FASHIONING FEMININITY: GENDER, DRESS, AND

IDENTITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY COLOMBIA

Laura Beltran-Rubio1

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Fashion Studies

MA Fashion Studies 2016 | Parsons School of Design

1 Beneficiaria COLFUTURO 2014

© 2016 Laura Beltran Rubio

All Rights Reserved

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations..........................................................................................................................................................iv

Acknowledgements..........................................................................................................................................................v

Abstract..............................................................................................................................................................................vi

Introduction.......................................................................................................................................................................1

I. Imagining a Colombian Identity: Narrating the Nation and Illustrating Culture...................................7

Unveiling the history of dress through literature and art......................................................................................7

Writing the history of Colombian women............................................................................................................12

The study of Colombian art and literature............................................................................................................16

Narrating the Nation and Illustrating Culture: A Road to Imagining the Colombian Identity....................20

II. The Domesticized Flower of Virginity..............................................................................................................24

Hail Mary, Full of Grace..........................................................................................................................................27

The Flower of Femininity........................................................................................................................................35

From Catholic Tradition to Deities of Antiquity.................................................................................................38

III. Fallen Angel, Savage Flower...............................................................................................................................42

Eve, the Jewish Traitor............................................................................................................................................45

The Angelical Game of Mischief...........................................................................................................................51

Fallen Angels, Living in Hell..................................................................................................................................54

IV. Dressing the Colombian Woman: Subverting Virginal Purity..................................................................58

Bibliography.....................................................................................................................................................................62

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 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Carmelo Fernández. Socorro, Notables de la Capital, 1850. Watercolor on paper.....................................29

Figure 2. Manuel María Paz. Tejedora: Provincia de Pasto, 1853. Watercolor on paper, 24 x 34 cm. Biblioteca

Nacional de Colombia.................................................................................................................................31

Figure 3. Manuel María Paz. Tejedoras de sombreros de jipijapa: Privincia de Neiva, 1857. Watercolor on paper, 23 x

31 cm. Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia..................................................................................................31

Figure 4. Carmelo Fernández. Tunja, Notables de la Capital, 1851. Watercolor on paper, 20 x 30 cm. Biblioteca

Nacional de Colombia.................................................................................................................................33

Figure 5. Carmelo Fernández. Vélez, Notables de la Capital, 1850. Watercolor on paper, 21 x 30 cm.

Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia...............................................................................................................33

Figure 6. Henry Price. Medellín, 1852. Watercolor on paper, 29 x 21 cm. Biblioteca Nacional de

Colombia........................................................................................................................................................36

Figure 7. Carmelo Fernández. Tejedoras y mercaderas de sombreros nacuma en Bucaramanga. Tipos blanco, mestizo y

zambo, 1850. Watercolor on paper, 23 x 30 cm. Biblioteca Nacional de

Colombia........................................................................................................................................................48

Figure 8. Carmelo Fernández. Vélez, Arriero i tejedor de Vélez, 1850. Watercolor on paper, 20 x 28 cm.

Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia...............................................................................................................50

Figure 9. Carmelo Fernández. Tundama, Habitantes notables, 1851. Watercolor on paper, 21 x 31 cm. Biblioteca

Nacional de Colombia.................................................................................................................................53

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

One of the first practices I was taught in life was to be thankful; and there is no better moment to be thankful
than now, when I see the first accomplishments in my path towards becoming a scholar finally come to life.

First and foremost, I want to thank Dr. Fabio Sánchez; if it were not for him, I probably would have
never found my way to Parsons, to fashion studies and costume history. I thank my mother, for always
supporting my “locuras” and being the most loving and nurturing individual I have ever been around. I thank
my father for always giving me, perhaps unconsciously, the motivation to do what I want and give my best to
become successful in the scholarly field I have chosen as my career. I thank my sister for always showing me
that everything can be achieved as long as you fight for it; there is no better moment to put it into practice
than when deciding to abandon it all and move to New York to pursue a career nobody in your home
country completely understands.

But this thesis would have never been possible without all the beautiful people that surrounded me
during the two years of the MA program. Diego, for his gift of María, and the endless support from the
moment of my application; María, for the infinite power of her friendship; Sintura, for the brainstorming
sessions that gave birth to this topic; all my friends in Colombia for their support, their love; Sebastián, for
calming my nerves in the last weeks of work on this thesis; my Parsons friends and colleagues, for their
feedback, comments and, most importantly, support in times of shared struggle; I will be eternally grateful.

Finally, I thank the powerful women that have become my mentors; the women that have showed
me how to combine a wonderful character with a knowledgeable mind, something I now know I want to
embody in my path towards becoming a fashion historian. The enthusiasm and feedback of Dr. Christina
Moon in this year of thesis writing has been the most important fuel for this final result. The wonderfully
exciting talks with Professor Elizabeth Morano, who introduced me to the study of fashion history through
dress and the novels of nineteenth-century Romanticism, continues to be one of my best outcomes of this
whole Master’s program. The time spent assisting Femke Speelberg at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, her
kind comments, and her always smiling face combined with a great knowledge in the study of decorative arts,
have become one of my greatest inspirations in the last few months; I somehow wish she had entered my life
sooner. Finally, Dr. Hazel Clark, who became, from my first semester at Parsons, the most vivid example of
the scholar I want to be. Without the opportunity she gave me of being her research assistant, almost as soon
as I moved to New York, I probably would have never understood the career path I now know I want to
follow, and this experience would have never been as nurturing as it was.

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 ABSTRACT

The nineteenth century was a period of great change for most Latin American nations, which gained

independence from a decaying Spanish Empire and saw their birth as republics and engaged in a process of

social, political and economic change in the construction of a national identity. In this process, the work of

artists and writers was of particular importance, as it was meant to spread around the newborn republics the

invented traditions and cultural imaginary upon which a strictly gendered idea of nationhood was to be

founded. Negotiating between traditional/colonial and progressive/republican values, writers and artists

created a gendered notion of the “ideal Colombian” through their works, and relegated the Colombian

woman to the domestic field, the ideal of womanhood being one of pure and submissive virginity. Although

such works highlighted certain characteristics of personality, they also emphasized the importance of

appearances, of manners, and of fashion/dress. This thesis focuses on the portrayal of femininity through

dress: it studies the construction of the ideal Colombian woman through the clothes she wears in two novels,

Jorge Isaacs’ María (1867) and Eugenio Díaz Castro’s Manuela (1858), and the watercolors produced by

Carmelo Fernández, Henry Price, and Manuel María Paz for the Comisión Corográfica, this work identifies the

different ways in which the specific characteristics of the ideal Colombian woman of the nineteenth century

are portrayed through dress, as well as the potential opportunities for the subversion of such ideals and the

creation of alternative forms of femininity.

Key Words: Dress History, Colombia, Nineteenth Century, Femininity, Foundational Fictions,

Costumbrismo.

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 INTRODUCTION

It is not unreasonable to see the birth of modern states as encouraging a desire to describe and find a way of
organizing the world theatre. In the diversity of divine creation, in the infinite variety of habits and manners,
in the multiplicity of ranks, professionals and adhesions, national stereotypes identified by dress were a way of
identifying oneself.

—Daniel Roche

One of the most important problems in the construction of Colombian nationhood is that of identity.

Emerging from the Colonial rule of the Spanish Empire and having to fight to earn its independence, the

Colombian republic of the nineteenth century faced a problem in the negotiation and renegotiations of ideals,

of the rules that would guide the society, of the shared myths, the cultural imaginary that shaped its culture.

Facing a variety of political debates in the construction of the national identity, artists became central in both

the construction of such an identity and its dispersion throughout a sparse and inherently mixed society—

mixed in ideals, in beliefs, in culture. Both artists and politicians of the time participated actively in building

an identity in response to old-colonial traditions and a new-republican thought. Beyond the political sphere, it

was the entire population of the country that was expected to engage in the building of nationhood: it were

the individuals, from their own place in society, that were meant to adopt and embody the ideals of

Colombianness that were being created by the intellectuals of the country.

Nineteenth-century Colombia thus saw the emergence of costumbrismo, perhaps one the first artistic

movements to develop in the Americas independently from Europe, which became the “standard feature” of

art and literature in the country. As Doris Sommer explains,

the function of costumbrismo was ‘to make the different strata of society comprehensible one to another,’ that
is to promote communal imaginings primarily through the middle stratum of writers and readers who
constituted the most authentic expression of natural feelings. Identifying with the heroes and heroines, readers
could be moved to imagine a dialogue among national sectors, to make convenient marriages…2

2 Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1991), 14.

1
With a clear emphasis in the documentation of the authentic national character, costumbrismo saw, especially in

the visual arts, the use of the type as its main feature. The type was the character that represented a specific

group of people, revealing the main characteristics of race, dress, and corporeal disposition, to name a few, of

the group.3 The typical novel or picture of costumbrismo would feature a character, a hero or heroine, that

represented the desired national identity in its purest version: one that would unite all the desired

characteristics that an individual should have in order to consider himself the best representation of the

national identity; one that would become the model after which the readers could construct their own

identities and perform their personalities. In the case of women, it taught them about their role in the society,

by sharing the image of the domestic heroine that they were meant to become. As part of their engagement in

costumbrismo, writers and artists also had a political role in the construction of an “imagined community”

around which to construct the national identity for the Colombia of the future, for their foundational fictions

were “precisely those fictions that [tried] to pass for truth and to become ground for political associations.”4

When I first started inquiring about costumbrismo and the arts of nineteenth-century Colombia I

stumbled upon Eugenio Díaz Castro’s Manuela (1858); I soon realized that the richness of its descriptions

and, more importantly, the self-claimed transparency of them—inherent in the ideas surrounding costumbrismo

itself—were a unique source for the study of dress and the ideals of gender and class that can be understood

with it. Manuela narrates the story of Don Demóstenes, who escaped from the capital after participating in the

Revolución de Melo of 1854, and ends up in Manuela’s house in a small village near the Magdalena River. Don

Demóstenes narrates the story of Manuela, who is in love with Dimas and wants to marry him. Don Tadeo, a

sort of villain landowner that seizes political power in the region, does not let them fulfill their wish. Manuela

and Dimas escape to Ambalema, running away from the hands of Don Tadeo, but he finds them there and

tries to kidnap Manuela. He is, however, captured and sent to jail and Manuela and Dimas are able to return

to their village and get married. But on the morning of the wedding, Manuela, as if forecasting her tragic

destiny, feels uncomfortable and nervous; it turns out that Don Tadeo has escaped from Ambalema and sets

3 Miguel Huertas Sánchez, “Del costumbrismo a la academia: Hacia la creación de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes” (exhibition catalogue, Museo
Nacional de Colombia, 5 December 2014–15 February 2015).
4 Doris Sommer, 45.

2
the church into fire, thus conducing Manuela to her deathbed in the moment she was meant to finally unite

her soul to that of Dimas in marriage.

Despite the richness and fresh humor of Manuela, however, the novel of choice for any study

involving nineteenth-century literature—due in great extent to its importance in the first stages of Colombian

literature—is Jorge Isaac’s María (1967), still considered the epitome of Romanticism in the country and even

Latin America. In the novel, considered by many an auto-biographical fiction, Isaacs narrates the story of two

young cousins, María and Efraín, who fall in love. Upon his arrival from school in the capital Efraín notices

his love for María, the now teenager that he had last seen as a child, and decides to marry her. But, as in any

good Romantic novel, this is not without any obstacles. María suffers from epilepsy, the illness that killed her

mother, and the arousal of emotions seems to be an important impediment to her good health. Efraín, on the

other hand, promised his father that he would leave to Europe to study medicine and abandon his love for

the duration of his studies. While Efraín is away, María’s illness continues to evolve and, although he is asked

to come back when she falls gravely ill, he does not make it before her death. Rich in descriptions and visual

imagery, as every Romantic novel should be, the depictions of dress in María were absolutely stunning and

provided me with a large base for the study of the notions of ideal femininity in nineteenth-century

Colombia.

I finally came back to the watercolors of the Comisión Corográfica, which I had studied during my early

university years. The Comisión Corográfica was an expedition in which a group of artists and intellectuals were

sent by the government to travel around the different regions of the country to investigate and document the

ways of living between the years of 1850 and 1859. Their work had the mission of aiding in the construction

of a political identity of the nation in four different aspects: geographical, literary, graphic, and botanical.5 It

was, therefore, one of the most important advances the production of art in nineteenth-century Colombia

and the messages transmitted through the resulting writings and images helped shape the perception of a

5 Beatriz González Aranda, Manual de arte del siglo XIX en Colombia (Bogota: Ediciones Uniandes, 2013).

3
National identity in Colombia during the second half of the century.6 The drawings created by Carmelo

Fernández, Henry Price, and Manuel María Paz for the Comisión Corográfica not only reveal some early artistic

explorations in terms of style but also reflect the main characteristics of costumbrismo in art.

My work for this thesis stems from my academic interest in the understanding of the ways in which

fashion is employed in the creation of an identity and the ways in which dress is conceived by literary writers

and artists in order to convey specific messages regarding the personalities of the characters they portray. I

first realized the importance of dress in the study of social history when I noticed that dress is a very clear

visual marker of the ideologies—in the social, economic and political fields—that shape a specific society at a

particular time. Focusing initially on the role of dress in the creation of a national identity in eighteenth- and

nineteenth-century France, I understood the importance of literature and art in the study of the interactions

between dress and socio-economic history. I was struck by the way in which Daniel Roche’s study of France

in the ancien régime and Susan Hiner’s study of nineteenth-century France construct different social histories of

costume by studying both literature and art. But soon I noticed that this was the case not only for French

literature and culture; Colombian culture—borrowing from French currents of thought quite often, in the

nineteenth century at least—saw a similar phenomenon. Moreover, Colombian culture is particularly centered

in appearances: in college, it was not uncommon to hear people—and groups of people—being called by the

way they dressed, and even today, the norms of civility are, in many ways, defined by specific rules in dress.

My knowledge of Colombian society, of its economic history, together with the deep interest I have in

uncovering some of the untold histories of the country—those that lie far beyond the exaggerated emphasis

on drugs and war that has predominated in the past century—were what encouraged me to study of the

history of fashion in Colombia.

By carefully analyzing the characterization of women in María, Manuela, and the watercolors of the

Comisión Corográfica, I intend to understand the construction of the ideal Colombian woman—one of virtuous

domesticity—as portrayed by writers and artists of the nineteenth century. I focus on the dress of female

6Andrés Guhl Corpas, “La Comisión Corográfica y su lugar en la geografía moderna y contemporánea,” Geografía física y política de la Confederación
Granadina, Vol. IV: Estado de Antioquia, Antiguas provincias de Medellín, Antioquia y Córdova (Medellín: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2005), 34.

4
characters in the construction of such an ideal and try to identify opportunities for subversion. In this thesis, I

intend to contribute not only to the field of fashion studies, but also to the history of a nation that continues

to be under construction. For, as Judith Colombia González Eraso argues,

La historia y la historiografía colombiana están en deuda con las mujeres y sus diferentes clases, razas, etnias,
orientaciones sexuales, edades y regiones; no se trata de nombrarlas por nombrarlas, incluirlas por incluirlas. La
inclusión no sólo significa describir su participación, sino estudiarlas a ellas, devolverles su lugar.

(The Colombian history and historiography are in debt with women and their different classes, races,
ethnicities, sexual orientations, ages and regions; it is not about naming them for the sake of naming them,
including them for the sake of including them. Inclusion does not only mean describing their participation, but
also studying them and returning them their place.

All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.)7

Colombia has reached a point in history in which it is willing to re-interpret and reconstruct itself in a

direction away from the already stereotypical vision of guerrillas, drug cartels, and corruption. Edna Van Der

Walde once said that it is not through intellectual work, through words, that the country has tried to solve its

problems throughout history; it has always resorted to arms. But, as recent efforts in peacemaking and the

civilized negotiation of a Peace Agreement have shown, Colombia seems ready to face a new effort in the

construction of a national identity away from the arms. This thesis, therefore, is a contribution to the

narration of the nation, the illustration of culture, and the fashioning of Colombianness, by highlighting the

importance of women in the history of a patriarchal society. I intend to write the history of art and costume

that have been so absent from cultural studies in the country, even until today. I intend to validate the role of

fashion and dress in the construction of a national identity, while bringing the history of women outside of

obscurity and highlighting their importance in both the creation and the perpetuation of the Colombian

nation. I intend to fill some of the gaps in the writing of history, tradition, and culture in a country where

these fields have been forgotten in an exaggerated attention to wars and drugs.

To do so, this thesis is organized as follows: The first chapter provides a review of the scholarly work

produced in relation to the study of costume history through literature and art in the nineteenth century, as

well as the theoretical orientation and methodology that will frame my analysis of the novels and drawings

around Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities.” The second chapter explores the notion of

7 Judith Colombia González Eraso, 184 (author’s translation).

5
woman as virgin, flower and angel, characterizing her as docile and pure, while sometimes even infantilizing

her, a type of femininity that is almost perfectly embodied by Isaac’s María. The third chapter, conversely,

explores the danger that is associated with woman, as a direct heiress of Eve, and the notion of “savageness”

in some of the heroines studied, as well as the potential empowerment that might result from it. It highlights

the crossing of boundaries of femininity in which Manuela engages, as well as the failure of María to be the

perfectly behaved virginal character in some instances. The final chapter ends this document with some

concluding remarks and a research agenda that will, hopefully, be used for the advance of scholarship in the

history of costume, fashion, and art in the country.

6
 I

IMAGINING A COLOMBIAN IDENTITY: NARATING THE

NATION AND ILLUSTRATING CULTURE

In my study of the construction of femininity within the nineteenth-century discourses of a Colombian

national identity, I have brought together, by necessity, a variety of areas of inquiry from different historical

traditions. My base has been the richness of work provided by scholars that have studied historical dress

through a combination of literature and art, and the works of Daniel Roche and Susan Hiner have been my

main sources of inspiration. I have returned to sociologists and philosophers, particularly to the work of

Judith Butler, to understand the conception gender as a social construct, and to historians to understand the

characteristics that lie behind the notion of Colombian womanhood in the nineteenth century. Finally, I have

borrowed from literary theory, where the study of foundational fictions has revolved around the ideas of

“imagined communities” and the relationship between nation and narration, introduced by Benedict

Anderson and Homi Bhabha respectively. I extend the notion of imagined communities beyond foundational

fictions to study, along with María and Manuela, the drawings produced during the years of the Comisión

Corogáfica. These works of art were attempts to construct an imagined community for the Colombian territory

from which a new national identity was to be constructed: I thus study the nation-building project in which

their creators engaged under the lens of costume history and gender studies, with the aim of uncovering the

notions of femininity in nineteenth-century Colombia as portrayed through dress.

Unveiling the history of dress through literature and art

The process of construction of a Colombian national identity produced a strictly gendered notion of the ideal

Colombian, which was created and re-created in literature and art. Writers and artists carefully portrayed a

variety of characteristics for the ideal Colombian woman, describing costume, manners, and even race and

class in the process. Being one of the most visual characteristics of personality, dress became an increasingly

7
important visual mechanism to show one’s identity: how one dressed had a direct relationship with the self,

and one could reveal details about social status, gender, even morality, through the characteristics of dress.

Practices of dress and the discourses on fashion surrounding them became “an important component of

culture, crucial to the micro-order of daily life … and crucial to one’s relationship with self and others.”8

Dress thus acquired a central role in shaping many nineteenth-century societies from around the world.

Roland Barthes was one of the pioneers in the interpretation of the representations of language and

pictures in material culture.9 Building on semiology, introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure,10 Barthes studies

fashion as a language, within a verbal or written realm. He thus understands clothing as a contained sign

system in which a garment can convey a particular meaning when placed in a specific context. The meaning

of clothing is communicated through a process of signification, where the garment can be understood as a

sign with two constituent parts: the physical signifier and the mental processes that reveal what is signified.

Although Barthes introduces the concept of semiotics for the study of contemporary fashion, his treating of

dress as a “written” medium through which mental associations emerge from the garments themselves is

particularly useful for my analysis. In his view, the meaning of fashion resides in an imagined space that is

created through the written allusions to clothing. Because my research deals with both written and visual

descriptions of femininity through dress, the treatment of the clothes worn by the women I study as a

language that conveys particular meanings, when placed in a specific context, becomes a key tool for my

analysis.

Beyond being understood as a language, however, dress needs to be understood within the social,

economic and political context in which it resides. Perhaps one of the earliest scholars to study the intrinsic

relationship between the history of material culture and the history of social behavior was Fernand Braudel, in

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, first published in 1949, where he studied

8 Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 77.
9 See Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1973); Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990); and Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion, trans. Andy Stafford, eds. Andy Stafford and Michael Carter (New
York; London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
10 Ferdinand de Saussure, A Course in General Linguistics (London: Peter Owen, 1960).

8
history through the interaction between material life, economics, and politics.11 More recently, Daniel Roche

built on this approach in The culture of clothing: Dress and fashion in the ‘ancien régime’, studying the history of dress

in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. Roche focuses on the constant interaction between costume

trends and the social context, for, as he argues, “the history of clothing tells us much about civilizations; it

reveals their codes.”12 He uses a variety of visual and literary sources, as well as descriptions of dress in them

as substitutes for the garments that no longer exist. While always remaining aware of the problem of bias in

the representations of dress created by writers and artists, Roche also recognizes their potential as sources for

the study of dress history: they both create impressions—sometimes of differences in status, race and

gender—while revealing what is expected at the particular time in which they work, and can be of extreme

importance in the inquiry of a scholar that knows how to take them with a grain of salt. The study of costume

history becomes, therefore, “less a matter of achieving an illustrative metatext on the basis of the original

texts of the novels, or of assembling from between them the realia, than of understanding the signifying

elements of the story and their logic. Thus reality interrogates fiction.”13

Aileen Ribeiro and Anne M. Buck provide similar arguments for the use of art and literature in the

study of dress history. Ribeiro positions the artist as a kind of historian, who analyzes and interprets clothing

in the process of recording it in his work; the artist thus creates depictions of clothing that become important

to the study of dress history because they reveal the culture, manners, and vision of their time.14 Buck uses

literature in the study of costume history and shows how analyzing the ways in which novelists use portrayals

of clothing can enhance our understanding of the past, especially as they show what she calls “dress in

action,” that is, the ways in which dress generates the codes for gender, politics, culture, and status. 15

Particularly in the nineteenth century, detailed descriptions of dress predominated in the writing of novels, a

characteristic that has often been linked to the heyday of Romanticism. But, as Susan Hiner explains, these

descriptions are extremely important in conveying the message the authors of the novels intend to share with

11 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press,
1995 [1949]).
12 Daniel Roche, The culture of clothing: Dress and fashion in the ‘ancien régime’, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1989]).
13 Ibid., 19.
14 Aileen Ribeiro, “Re-Fashioning Art: Some Visual Approaches to the Study of the History of Dress,” Fashion Theory 2 (1998): 323.
15 Anne M. Buck, “Clothes in Fact and Fiction: 1825–1865,” Costume 17 (1983): 89-104.

9
their readership: “continuous references to elements of fashion, their circulation, and potential imitation of

them are more than mere descriptive details. The discourse on fashion is in fact a cover for the social

anxieties underlying [the] texts.”16 Nineteenth-century novels such as María and Manuela thus present a type

of metonymy in which “the clothes make the woman,”17 and the descriptions of their dress can be translated

to descriptions of their own character.

Although the close relationship between dress choices and social anxieties was common in every

nineteenth-century society of the West, dress was of particular importance in Colombia. The nature of dress

in Colombia, as in most of Latin America, results from the overlapping socio-historical influences that have

shaped costume and its relationship with cultural dynamics, as Regina A. Root explains in her introduction to

The Latin American Fashion Reader. Social identities in Latin America, especially during the Colonial period,

revolved around a discourse in which the structures of power and privilege present nudity as a symbol of the

“barbarian” other and the clothed body as the representation of the “civilized” European.18 Although by the

mid-nineteenth century this notion of a fully clothed elite versus nude “savages” had been lost as a result of

the Colonial period, the remains of this confrontation between clothed/civilized and nude/savage can be

traced in the use of shoes: the boot became to symbolize the civilized individual, the member of the elite, and

the bare foot or the foot half-shod with espadrilles—a kind of sandal made with natural fibers, often worn by

country people—became to represent the nude savage.

Dress also became essential in the construction of a nineteenth-century Colombian society because,

as Mariselle Meléndez explains, it is a system of visual representation that provided the opportunity for visual

difference in Latin America. Such a creation of difference was particularly important at a time when skin

color could no longer reveal differences in race and status between one person and another, a result of the

increased miscegenation that took place in the country, especially towards the end of the Colonial period.19

16 Susan Hiner, Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia; Oxford: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010),
20.
17 Ibid., 36.
18 Regina A. Root, ed. The Latin American Fashion Reader (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2005).
19 Mariselle Meléndez, “Visualizing Difference: The Rhetoric of Clothing in Colonial Spanish America,” The Latin American Fashion Reader, ed. Regina

A. Root (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2005), 17-30.

10
Dressing habits replaced the differentiating role that the color of the skin previously had and clothing became

a threatening element in the societies of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, as it could enable

people from lower sectors to look like their social superiors. The need to control dressing habits soon became

apparent, turning dress into a central element in the construction of femininity in nineteenth-century

Colombia: the predominant discourses that attempted to control women’s roles in the society and public

spaces were often based on their dress practices. As a result, “male authorities engaged in a criticism of

woman as an excessive consumer of clothes [that] made connections between the use of clothes and women’s

visibility outside the domestic place.” 20 Women were told—usually by men—to embody the virtue that

society expected of them. This could be done through their uses of dress, and often required a white linen

dress with a full skirt and a shawl that covered the entire body, from the neck to the ground, not even

revealing the shod foot.

In this context, depictions of dress in both visual and written sources in Colombia become vivid

representations of the “dress in action” previously introduced and provide extremely valuable information to

the costume historian, as they reveal cultural norms of the time and the social anxieties that surrounded dress

practices. Moreover, and due to the political character of the novels and drawings selected for this thesis,21

the types of dress portrayed in them became an example for the Colombian woman of the nineteenth century

to mold her personality around them. The construction of the national identity in which Colombian writers

and artists engaged provided an image of the ideal woman, which was spread throughout the country with the

publishing of novels and the diffusion of drawings and prints. By reading novels and looking at visual sources

of information, the Colombian woman learned the role she was expected to have in the society, and it became

her responsibility to embody it in her own self. She was expected to engage independently in achieving the

feminine ideal, especially through her choices of dress and behavior, without having the patriarchal ruler

imposing it directly on her; she was expected to engage in a process of self-surveillance and discipline,22 where

the “disciplinary power that inscribe[d] femininity in the female body [was] everywhere and … nowhere; the

20 Mariselle Meléndez, 27.

21 The idea of a political character in the creation of literature and art will be studied in more detail in the last section of this chapter.
22 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1977).

11
disciplinarian [was] everyone and yet no one in particular.”23 In such a process, even though the dress choices

of the woman appeared to be produced independently and voluntarily, they were, in reality, the imposition of

an idealized femininity in a patriarchal system of unequal relations of power.

Writing the history of Colombian women

In nineteenth-century Colombia, the notion of an ideal woman was constructed by negotiating old colonial

institutions, inherited from the Spanish Empire, with new republican values, mostly inspired in the ideas of

the French Revolution, in an attempt to maintain order among the masses while establishing a clearly new

regime. These theories of thought were illuminated by the values of freedom and citizenship that emerged

towards the end of the eighteenth century and inspired by the philosophies of Bentham and the French

Enlightenment, particularly those of Tocqueville and Rousseau, who explored the ideas of freedom of the

people and responsibilities of the republican state. By engaging in the negotiation between old-colonial and

new-republican values, the intellectual class intended to create a national type that, without disowning the

Hispanic ancestral virtues, embraced the ideals of the French Revolution and had an English sense of labor

and capacity of economic performance.24 The intellectual elites utilized such a negotiation in order to capture

political power and gain the support of the majority of the population,25 while also trying to maintain national

cohesion and stabilize political order from the foundation of the Colombian nation. By engaging in the

construction of a mixed national identity that included cultural traces of the different types of people

inhabiting the Nation, the intellectual elites provided a cultural identity with which most of the inhabitants of

the Colombian territory could identify themselves with, thus safeguarding their power and guaranteeing the

basis of its prolongation in the future.

The Colombian national identity created in the nineteenth century was clearly gendered and the ways

in which gender was constructed still need to be studied thoroughly. The most important studies of the

23 Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of
Oppression (London; New York: Routledge, 1990), 63-82.
24 Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, El Pensamiento Colombiano en el Siglo XIX (Bogota: Planeta Colombiana Editorial S.A., 1996), 42.
25 An idea that illuminated by the writings on democratic regimes produced in: Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship

and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

12
history of Colombia have focused in the social and economic achievements of middle and upper class male

criollo. For example, William Paul McGreevey’s Historia Económica de Colombia and Marco Palacios’ and Frank

Safford’s Historia de Colombia: País Fragmentado, Sociedad Dividida illustrate the challenges the country faced in

the transition from the Colonial regime into an independent Republic during the century in terms of the

economy.26 They explore the co-existence of Spanish colonial ideals with new republican thought during the

years after the Independence and highlight the aspects of economic and social policy that either broke entirely

with the colonial régime or provided some continuity in the transition towards a new Republic, with the

relationship between the Catholic Church and the State being one of the most important topics in the debate.

They demonstrate the constant struggle to develop both the domestic economy and the international trade

and the severe lag the country experienced in terms of development, while also revealing the instability the

nation faced amid the incessant fear of Civil War, the frequent reformulation of the constitutions, and the

constant changes in political ideologies.27 Despite providing a comprehensive account for the economic and

business aspects of history, these studies do not nurture a discussion focused on the creation of a national

identity in anything other than providing general contextual information. Jaime Jaramillo Uribe’s Historia del

Pensamiento Colombiano en el siglo XIX explores the changing political ideologies of the nineteenth century,

based on the different currents of thought that predominated among Colombian philosophers.28 This book

highlights the important influence of British and French currents of thought in the attempt to balance

Spanish Colonial traditions with newer republican ways of being and provides an overview of the most

important philosophers and political writers of the time. However, the content of the book is largely

encyclopedic and theoretical, and does not provide room for the study of the role of women and non-criollos

in the process of nation building that took place in Colombia during the nineteenth century.

Fortunately enough, scholars have more recently understood the importance of filling in the gaps left

by a partial writing of Colombian history. Judith Colombia González Eraso, for example, argues that

26 William Paul McGreevey, Historia Económica de Colombia, 1845-1930 (Bogota: Ediciones Uniandes, 2015 [1971]). Marco Palacios & Frank Safford,
Historia de Colombia: País fragmentado, sociedad dividida (Bogota: Ediciones Uniandes, 2013 [2002])
27 Colombia’s instability can be fully evidenced in the several civil wars that occurred during the nineteenth century, as well as the eleven constitutions

that existed between 1821 and 1886, when the first long-lasting constitution (which endured until 1991) was written.
28 Jaime Jaramillo Uribe. His work reveals how the work of Bentham, Tocqueville and Rousseau influenced the writings of Colombian thinkers of the

nineteenth century.

13
Colombian history has focused almost entirely on the history of the State, of elites and wars, relegating every

other aspect of national history to obscurity.29 The history of the Independence, she argues, focuses on the

male criollo, leaving the indigenous population, afro-descendants, countrymen, the youth, and even less

affluent criollos, outside of the process. González Eraso thus opens the path towards the study of women’s

history in the country, particularly of those women who enjoyed an active public or political life, but her work

focuses on the period of Independence, leaving the later period of the construction of the nation virtually

untouched. During the entire nineteenth century, and possibly even until today, the history of Colombia has

been written mostly about the elites and its superior representative, the upper-class criollo, and the

involvement of women in the history of the creation of the nation still needs to be rescued from obscurity.

Following the global trend in the uncovering of the histories of non-members of the elites, this thesis aims to

provide an initial path towards the study of nineteenth-century womanhood in Colombia, especially in

relation to dress.

Other scholars have helped uncover the characteristics that the ideal Colombian woman of the

nineteenth century was expected to embody. Javier Torres Preciado analyzes the construction of an ideal

woman through the constitutions and other relevant political texts of the second half of the century and

explains that the conservative thought predominant at the time maintained the patriarchal structure of the

Colonial period within Colombian society. The ideal woman in the nineteenth-century Colombian society was

virtuous and honest and embodied the highest standards for sanctity in a predominantly Catholic country.

Women were relegated to the household, where they were meant to “respalda[r], ama[r], alimenta[r] y

perd[er], casi siempre, a sus hijos, esposos, hermanos y padres” (support, love, nurture, and lose, almost

always, their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers).30 By making the ideal woman indispensable within the

household, intellectuals excluded her almost entirely from the public sphere, limiting her public life to the act

of marriage. Elizabeth Garrels similarly explains that women were expected to stay at home and become

mothers, whose sole labor was to bring up citizens of virtue that would serve the nation.31 This ideal of a

29 Judith Colombia González Eraso: 171-189.

30 Javier Torres Preciado, “La mujer en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX: una sombra presente,” Revista GOLIARDOS 12 (2010), 54.
31 Elizabeth Garrels, “La Nueva Eloísa en América o el ideal de la mujer de la generación de 1837,” Nuevo Texto Crítico 4 (1989): 27-38.

14
woman, which clearly followed Rousseau’s thoughts on the role of the feminine sex in the early years of the

French Republic, recognized the importance of female education only in the field of the arts and other so-

called feminine areas of study that would keep them away, as Pratt explains, from fickleness and vanity.32

Although these studies illuminate the social expectations of woman in nineteenth-century Colombia, they

ignore the importance of dress in the formulation of a female identity in the country, especially since ideals of

sanctity, virtue, and purity of the soul were to be communicated through manners and the use of clothing.

Finally, Nina Gerassi-Navarro argues that, in the nineteenth-century Colombian society, the place

and role of women were restricted to the domestic space: they had the responsibility of maintaining

patriarchal moral values, unity within the family and, under the dominance of the patriarchal leader, avoid

conflict and remain at the margin of the political sphere. Even when literature started acquiring the didactic

character that promoted what writers believed was the ideal republican and democratic life, the rights and

obligations of women within society remained restricted to a domestic setting.33 Gerassi-Navarro’s work is

particularly interesting because of her attention the particular case of Soledad Acosta de Samper, who was

perhaps the most important female writer of her time. The study views her participation in the public sphere

as a potential site for women’s empowerment in nineteenth-century Colombia. However, it leaves untouched

the aspects of clothing and self-presentation in society in the rare cases where it was allowed. As Julia Twigg

explains, “dress can be part of a wider process of governmentality in relation to women’s bodies in which

they are increasingly subject to disciplinary demands regarding appearance.”34 If some women were able to

make rare appearances in the Colombian social scene, how would they dress so as not to be subjected to the

Rousseau-inspired expectation of domesticity? What role would dress play in their performance and

aspiration to embody the perfect ideal of virtuous femininity?

32 Mary Louise Pratt, “Repensar la modernidad,” Espiral 5 (1999): 47-72.

33 Nina Gerassi-Navarro, “La mujer como ciudadana: Desafíos de una coqueta en el siglo XIX,” Revista Iberoamericana 63 (1997): 129-140.
34 Julia Twigg, “Fashion, the Body, and Age,” The Handbook of Fashion Studies, eds. Sandy Black et al. (London; New Delhi; New York; Sydney:

Bloomsbury, 2013), 83.

15
The study of Colombian art and literature

One of the less privileged fields of study in Colombian scholarship is the study of art history in the nineteenth

century. Work in the topic is virtually inexistent, with Beatriz González Aranda’s Manual de arte del siglo XIX en

Colombia and several exhibition catalogues produced by the Museo Nacional being the main sources of

information.35 González Aranda’s manual explores some of the most significant aspects of the production of

art in the country at the time: from the initial illustrations of nature during the Botanical Expedition, at the

end of the eighteenth century, to the birth of costumbrismo in visual arts, the development of caricature and

engraving as a way of communicating revolutionary thoughts in the late-nineteenth century, and the adoption

of daguerreotypes and photography towards the beginning of the twentieth century, it provides a basic

overview of the history of art in nineteenth-century Colombia. However, being largely an overview of artistic

production at the time studied, the manual fails to answer questions regarding the reach and impact of art in

the nation and the use of art in the creation of a national identity. Furthermore, it falls under the traditional

elite-centered approach to the history of Colombia that focuses exclusively in the most significant, usually

government-sponsored, manifestations of art, leaving untouched many aspects of independent production of

artwork and smaller projects in which nineteenth-century artists engaged.

Similarly, several books and articles regarding the drawings produced in the years of the Comisión

Corográfica have been published, although most of them are albums with the descriptions of the different

geographic areas, the landscapes, the culture, and a basic overview of the typical dress worn by locals.36

Despite providing a great opportunity for an increased knowledge of the origins of art in the country, these

books also fail to provide a deep study of the drawings, of the technical aspects in an emerging field of art in

Colombia, and of their influence in the process of nation building at this crucial time period. Fortunately,

recent attempts lead by the Museo Nacional de Colombia have enhanced the understanding of nineteenth-century

35Beatriz González Aranda.

36See, for example, En busca de un país: La comisión corográfica (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1984); Viajeros colombianos por Colombia (Bogota: Fondo
Cultural Cafetero, 1977); Jaime Ardila and Camilo Lleras, Acuarelas de la Comisión Corográfica (Popayan: Museo Nacional de Colombia; Banco de la
República, Subgerencia Cultural, 1986); and Patricia Londoño Vega, Acuarelas y dibujos de Henry Price para la comisión corográfica de la Nueva Granada
(Bogota: Banco de la República, Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, 2007). There is also a manuscript titled Album de la Comisión Corográfica at the Biblioteca
Luis Ángel Arango in Bogota.

16
art in the country, such as the exhibition “Del costumbrismo a la academia: Hacia la creación de la escuela

nacional de Bellas Artes,”37 and its catalogue; exhibitions like this held at the museum have provided some

initial advancement in the field, although a wider readership and a more active conversation between scholars

awaits to be developed.

Somewhat more fortunately, the study of literature has gained more attention, especially in recent

decades. Several accounts of the history of Colombian literature exist, but many of them only provide basic

overviews of the most important novels written at a time, excluding other genres of literature. Some of these

even provide inaccurate dates of publication, possibly a result of the difficulty in accessing manuscripts and

complete information about the production of novels, thus leading to confusion in the subject.38 Antonio

Curcio Altamar, in his Evolución de la novela en Colombia, provides an overview on the history of literature but

fails to detain in the study of particular novels.39 Jorge Orlando Melo’s La literatura histórica en la República faces

a similar problem, although it provides an interesting account on the writing of history through literature in

the country.40 The study of individual written pieces has therefore become the most common way of studying

the history of Colombian literature. Although this provides profound analysis and diversified points of view

of certain novels, it also excludes some relevant written pieces from scholarly analysis. Manuela seems to be

one such example.

Despite its importance as one of the most vivid demonstrations of costumbrismo—considered by many

the first literary and artistic movement to emerge in South America independently from Europe—and its role

in the creation of Colombianness, Eugenio Díaz Castro’s groundbreaking novel Manuela awaits to be studied

by scholars of different fields. The novel provides detailed descriptions of the customs of nineteenth-century

Colombia, which are inherently related to national identity and its construction, but has not gained as much

attention as it deserves. One of the few scholarly studies of Manuela, written by Rafael Maya, explores the

37 Huertas Sánchez.
38 Most of these are united under the Selección Samper Ortega, which contains a hundred volumes on the history of Colombian literature, including the
chapters: Historia de la literatura colombiana by José J. Ortega T., Resumen de la historia de la literatura colombiana by Gustavo Otero Muñoz, and Panorama de la
literatura colombiana by Nicolás Bayona Posada.
39 Antonio Curcio Altamar, Evolución de la novela en Colombia (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1957).
40 Jorge Orlando Melo, La literatura histórica en la República (Bogotá: Procultura/Planeta, 1988).

17
expression of costumbrismo as a literary current in Colombia. Maya argues that, within costumbrismo, writers

engaged in the labor of interpreting their time and elaborating a historic picture of the Colombian society,

thus writing an important piece of national history. But in his praise of Díaz Castro’s genius in the creation of

Colombian costumbrismo, Maya fails to see the importance of dress in the creation of his characters, which are

considered to be a somewhat accurate representation of real Colombian people. Díaz Castro engages in

lengthy descriptions of the clothes worn by his characters, in particular those worn by Manuela, thus

providing an extremely rich basis for the study of costume history in nineteenth-century Colombia. However,

the richness and intended transparency of his descriptions have not yet been explored and their analysis still

needs to be used to uncover the social history of nineteenth-century Colombia beyond the urban elites.

María, unlike Manuela, has been one of the few novels to gain attention from a wide public since it

was first published. Considered the epitome of Colombian Romanticism, a discussion of María is mandatory

in every work of nineteenth-century Colombian literature, although such an emphasis has caused other great

works of the century to be ignored. The exaggerated emphasis on María and its canonical status are, as Doris

Sommer explains,

…surprising, almost perverse. Although the socially engaged novels being written in Colombia and in the rest
of Latin America led up to telling conclusions, this tragedy seems rather gratuitous and unaccountable… María
neither projects futures nor finds any obstacle that it might hope to overcome. Instead, it is inexplicably sad, as
sad and reluctant to say why as Latin America’s elite readership must have been when it preferred María’s
lament for lost privilege over the romances that so eagerly embraced and entitled subalterns.41

María’s interminable sadness, Sommer argues, seems to promise nothing but laments to the history of the

newborn Colombian republic. However, beyond the lament of sadness, Sommer finds some hope in the

novel, as would be expected of any other foundational novel: the love relationship between María and Efraín,

so impossible that it has to end with María’s death in the absence of her fiancé, warns the country of the

importance of engaging in appropriate relationships in order to build a durable future. María’s Jewishness,

highlighted throughout the novel despite her devotion to the Catholic Virgin, places her in a muddy area that

simultaneously constructs her identity as outsider and insider, as a Jewish immigrant and a Catholic

Colombian. María’s Jewishness and virginal femininity, Sommer explains, become tools meant to instruct the

41 Doris Sommer, 172-3.

18
Colombian readership on how to engage in appropriate love relationships that allow them to create a

powerful Colombian identity that will endure through the ages.42

In response to Sommer’s proposition, Gustavo Faverón Patriau argues that Isaacs did not expect his

Colombian readership to engage in miscegenation or in class- and race-appropriate relationships. While

recognizing that the idea of a mixed Colombian race is implicitly touched in the novel, Faverón Patriau does

not see a direct proposal from the author for the people to engage in the creation of a mixed race: the most

successful relationships seen in the novel are those in which miscegenation seems to be completely absent,

leading him to conclude that Isaac’s construction of the nation was to be held not within the national territory

but from the outside, from a place of diaspora.43 Several other readings of Jewishness have predominated in

the analysis of María, as well as the comparison of the heroin with Virgin Mary, which comes rather

straightforwardly because of her name. If María were meant to represent the human embodiment of Virgin

Mary or of the mixing of Anglo-Jewish and Colombian peoples in order to achieve the ideal national identity,

would her dress somehow be part of the construction of her personality?

Isaacs, like Díaz Castro, engages in detailed descriptions of the clothing worn by his heroine

throughout the novel, thus contributing to the creation of the ideal Colombian woman he attempted to share

with the country. On the other hand, the drawings produced by the Comisión Corográfica also illustrated what

the various types of Colombian women were meant to look like in different parts of the country. How did

Díaz Castro, Isaacs, and the artists of the Comisión Corográfica use dress to purvey the ideal of Colombianness

through his characters in María? How was the ideal Colombian woman meant to look like and how did this

relate to what she was expected to be? And, most importantly, how did the ideal of womanhood portrayed in

these two heroines relate to visual sources distributed around the country, which were more accessible to

women that could not read? If the descriptions of the dresses worn by María, Manuela, and the other

characters of the novels are so important so as to take pages of the novel, and if the dresses of women were

so important so as to be portrayed exclusively in artwork commissioned by the government, they are

42 Doris Sommer.
43 Gustavo Faverón Patriau, “Judaísmo y desarraigo en María de Jorge Isaacs,” Revista Iberoamericana 70 (2004): 341-357.

19
definitely worth studying, despite the lack of attention to dress in scholarly study and analysis of the novels so

far.

Narrating the Nation and Illustrating Culture: The road to imagining a Colombian identity

Literary writers and artists of nineteenth-century Colombia, as I mentioned earlier, acquired an important

political role in the construction of a national identity, engaging in the production of nationalist art in both

literary and visual forms. Nationalist art, as David E.W. Fenner explains, “consists of artifactual objects

accepted and interpreted by the art world as art that support the assertion of self-identity of a people made

over and against other people or states as a declaration of the right to preserve and advance its own identity in

an international world.”44 These artifactual objects include works of art belonging to the visual, literary and

performance fields and, as Plato, Marx, and even Mao Tse-Tung, were avid to explain, support the state in the

creation of a national identity. Whether it is to heighten the heroic and exemplary actions of the state and its

citizens, as was the case in Plato,45 or to show national reality as typically and ordinarily as possible, as in

Marx, art supports the project of creation of a national identity. In representing their notions of an ideal

Colombian identity in their work, Colombian writers and artists created what Benedict Anderson calls

“imagined communities,”46 while inventing the Colombian traditions that were to shape Colombianness from

the nineteenth century on.

Nationalist thought thus acquired an essential role in literature and authors engaged in what Homi

Bhabha calls “narrating the nation,” through which they built ideas of the “heroic past, great men, glory

[which are] the social capital upon which one bases a national idea,” as Ernest Renan explains.47 But more

than highlighting the heroic past of the newborn Colombian nation, a past that was most likely to be found in

the Independence wars or their ancient indigenous warriors, writers and artists of the nineteenth century

engaged in the creation of new common memories that would make up the legacy that would unite the

44 David E.W. Fenner, Art in Context: Understanding Aesthetic Value (Athens, OH: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2008), 232.
45 Plato. The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 360 B.C.), available online,
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html.
46 Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York; London: Verso, 2006 [1983]), 4.
47 Ernest Renan, “What is a nation?” trans. Martin Thom, Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York; London: Routledge, 1995 [1990]), 19.

20
Colombian peoples not only during the politically unstable times of the early republic but also for the future

of the nation. This effort of narrating the nation in which Colombian artists engaged is further explored by

Ángel Rama, who argues that, before even allowing for the practical creation of the nation, the intellectual

class of the time engaged in the labor of thinking and constructing, as a written product, the city that would

govern the newborn nation. In doing so, and based on the virtue of permanence of signs through time, the

intellectual class was establishing order to impede future disorder while creating a rigid categorization in

which the national identity was to be founded.48

The idea of a national identity provided by the Colombian intellectual elites of the nineteenth century

created what Eric Hobsbawm calls “invented traditions,” whose main purpose is to provide continuity of a

new reality with a suitable historic past and emerge within a dateable period and establish with great rapidity.49

Thus, they were central in the creation of an idea of the nation, which Anderson explains is imagined, limited,

and a community. He positions the concept of “nation-ness” as a cultural artifact that can be transplanted

self-consciously in a variety of political and ideological contexts. Because a national identity cannot be

remembered, he proposes, it must be narrated in a homogeneous and empty time, where the imagined

community acquires a historical frame and a sociological setting. The work of the intellectual class,

particularly that of literary writers, therefore acquires importance in the construction of a national imagined

community. This process of construction of nation-ness, though important in every emerging society, saw its

inception in the political governmental agenda in Latin America with the achievement of Independence.50 But

the notions of narrating the nation and the creation of imagined communities are not exclusive of literary

work and can be extended to the creation of visual art. Among the subjects of drawings and prints of the

nineteenth century, the creation of a national type and the landscapes of different regions of the country were

predominant, and they also narrated the ideal nation that artists were helping construct, the community they

were imagining. They, additionally, contributed to the creation of a “cultural imaginary” that would be shared

by the Colombian peoples.

48 Ángel Rama, La ciudad letrada (Montevideo: Arca, 1998).

49 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ragner (Cambrige: Cambridge
University Press, 2004[1983]): 1-14.
50 Benedict R. O’G. Anderson.

21
 Cornelius Castoriadis defined the social imaginary as a mixture of imaginary social significations,

which regulates discourses, practices, and even desires and emotions in a group of people belonging to the

same social context and through which a society is then able to build its own identity. 51 Building on this

concept, Graham Ward defined “cultural imaginary” as “the magma of social significations that makes any

forms of sociality possible… religious traditions, which long have retained theological accounts of societas,

[have] a major contribution to make here to public discourse…”52 The cultural imaginary, then, shapes life in

a particular society and gives life both meaning and purpose, despite being an unconscious set of norms that

shape a particular society. The cultural imaginary is unrecognized and taken for granted and comprises the set

of beliefs, norms, and expected behaviors for people in a particular society. 53 The social and cultural

imaginaries are extremely important in the study of fashion as a cultural product, since they reflect the idea,

constantly explored in the field of fashion studies, that fashion is dependent on the interactions between

individuals in a society. Fashion does not emerge exclusively from the existence of a garment, but results

from the interaction of that garment with a body and, simultaneously, with other garments and other bodies

in the social context in which it exists.

The creation of a national subject, of the ideal Colombian woman that was imagined in the most

important works of art created during the nineteenth century and after which Colombian women were to

model their own selves, is the main focus of this thesis. As has already been explained, the construction of a

Colombian identity in the nineteenth century was strictly gendered and the differences between the sexes

where emphasized by dress. As Joanne Entwistle explains, “fashion is ‘obsessed with gender’ and constantly

plays with the gender boundary, precisely how it does so and precisely how gender gets codified in dress is

highly variable and dependent upon factors operating within the social context.”54 In the construction of

femininity in nineteenth-century Colombia, dress played an essential role in the representation of the ideal

characteristics a woman was expected to embody, as well as in the creation of gender, racial, and social

difference. However, the interaction between dress and femininity in the creation of the ideal Colombian

51 Cornelius Castoriadis, L’institution imaginaire de la société (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975).

52 Graham Ward, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 164.
53 Chad Lakies, “Challenging the Cultural Imaginary: Pieper on How Life Might Live,” New Blackfriars (2010), 500.
54 Joanne Entwistle, 52.

22
woman of the nineteenth century still needs to be uncovered. By closely analyzing the clothing worn by

María, Manuela, and a carefully selected group of women portrayed in the watercolors of the Comisión

Corográfica that nurture the descriptions of the dress worn by Isaacs’ and Díaz Castro’s characters, this thesis

studies the ways in which costume favored the creation of Colombianness. In doing so, it highlights aspects

of nineteenth-century art and literature that have been ignored, thus contributing to a new scholarship that is

returning to the roots of a country that is still struggling to find an identity out of conflict and engaging in the

latent necessity of writing the history of art in Colombia. This thesis contributes to the exploration of

women’s history in an endemically patriarchal and elitist society, in which the role of women and minorities in

the creation of the nation has consistently been left out of historical accounts. It provides a first step in the

writing of a costume history in Colombia, a society where appearances continue to rule one’s identity to the

world, as a mechanism of both interpretation and performance of one’s identity.

23
 II

THE DOMESTICIZED FLOWER OF VIRGINITY

María, from the first moment we meet her, is portrayed as “humble” and “cold”, the shade of death lingering

around her from the beginning of her tragic story. After having lived in the capital as a student for several

years, Efraín, narrator of the story and platonic lover of the heroine, finally sees the virginal, pure girl he had

left behind upon his departure:

María me ocultaba sus ojos tenazmente; pero pude admirar en ellos la brillantez y hermosura de los de las
mujeres de su raza, en dos o tres veces que a su pesar se encontraron de lleno con los míos; sus labios rojos,
húmedos y graciosamente imperativos, me mostraron sólo un instante el velado primor de su linda dentadura.
Llevaba … la abundante cabellera castaño-oscura arreglada en dos trenzas, sobre el nacimiento de una de las
cuales se veía un clavel encarnado. Vestía un traje de muselina ligera, casi azul, del cual sólo se descubría parte
del corpiño y la falda, pues un pañolón de algodón fino color de púrpura, le ocultaba el seno hasta la base de su
garganta de blancura mate. Al volver las trenzas a la espalda, de donde rodaban al inclinarse ella a servir, admiré
el envés de sus brazos deliciosamente torneados, y sus manos cuidadas como las de una reina.

(María hid her eyes from me fiercely; but I could admire in them the brilliance and loveliness of the eyes of the
women of her race in the two or three times that, to her regret, they fully found mine; her red lips, damp and
graciously imperative, showed me for one instant the veiled perfection of her beautiful denture. Her abundant
chestnut hair was arranged in two braids, an ingrown carnation at the top of one of the braids. She wore a dress
of light muslin, almost blue, of which could be seen only part of the bodice and the skirt, as a shawl of purple
colored fine cotton hid her bosom up to the base of her throat of matte whiteness. As the braids returned to
her back, from which they slid when she inclined to serve the food, I admired the underside of her deliciously
contoured arms and her hands, well-kept as those of a queen. 14)

Rich in descriptions, metaphors and allegories, Isaacs’ introduction of María manages to convey the virginal,

mythological being that she is meant to represent. It additionally helps uncover the most important features

of the ideal woman in nineteenth-century Colombia, which is also seen in some of the watercolors of the

Comisión Corográfica. Using the description of María provided above, the main characteristics of the ideal

femininity can be identified, with her submission to the male narrator being the first. María hides her eyes

away from him, while literally serving him, submitting immediately to male dominance; she recognizes her

female status as a sinner and source for temptation and potential cause of ruin for men—a point that is later,

and more explicitly, mentioned in the novel through a warning of Efraín’s father. María’s understanding of

her status as a source for male temptation is further enhanced by her dress, which covers her body from the

neck down, as if trying to hide her corporeal beauty from the male gaze and thus avoid causing any type of

24
sexual temptation. This modesty, so desirable in the nineteenth-century Colombian woman, is meant to bring

the character as close as possible to Virgin Mary herself, an association that is not only self-evident from

María’s name, but that is insistently reinforced throughout the novel.

The lightest blue tone of her dress is used to portray the idea of “truth, constancy, fidelity, and

heaven”55 and provides a direct association with the Catholic Virgin, who has been portrayed wearing the

color very often throughout the history of art. Blue symbolizes purity, innocence, and the holiness of the

virgin; it is the color of passive meditation and obedience, traces that can be identified in María’s character.

Representing her dressed in blue, Isaacs links María to the Virgin, an association that also informs the reader

about María’s white race. María is portrayed as a beautiful woman with white porcelain skin, dark hair, and

red lips, notions of beauty that are informed by the Roman ideal of femininity, inherited from the Spanish

tradition that had ruled in the colonial times. The direct allusion to a carnation, which María wears in her hair,

symbolizes pride and beauty and reveals additional details of her virginal character. 56 The color of the

carnation, however, is not defined by the author, which leaves room for a possibility of death, of impossible

love, that specific colors of this flower can convey. This idea of loss is further enhanced by the purple accents

in María’s dress, following the symbolism of Catholic tradition, where purple is the color of lent, of penitence

and vigil, as it is the result of “mixing red (passion) and blue (devotion).”57 Throughout the novel, María is

dressed in different colors and juxtaposed to different types of flowers, all of which reveal certain

characteristics of her personality, and which model the type of femininity portrayed through her character.

The Virgin Mary, however, is not the only religious character that María is associated with. A clear

identification with classical deities also comes to life from this early description of María, evidenced both in

the white muslin dress that, without much detail, can be imagined draping around the body in the best Greco-

Roman style, and the sculptural toning of her arms. Muslin seems to be the type of fabric preferred by María,

one she wears often and that other women living in warm weather regions of Colombia, including the

55 Barbara Dee Baumgarten, “Elements of Unity: Matters of Design,” Vestments for All Seasons (New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2002), 35.
56 “Flower Meanings,” The Flower Expert: Guide on Flowers and Gardening, accessed 28 December 2015,
http://www.theflowerexpert.com/content/aboutflowers/flower-meanings.
57 Ibid.

25
characters in Manuela, choose to wear. But it also seems to be the preferred type of fabric chosen by

nineteenth-century Colombian authors, always inspired in the French Enlightenment, to convey associations

to Classical antiquity, which provides a role model for both the modern, newborn State, and the ideal type of

femininity expected of women that inhabit it.58 Additionally, María’s innocence and her submissive character,

together with that playfulness that can be evidenced in her brilliant gaze or the her perfect smile, reveal an

association of María with angels, the seemingly inoffensive—though somewhat dangerous—beings so often

associated with children that are repeatedly mentioned in religious tradition and represented in Christian art.

The playfulness of these characters is embodied in María’s braids, which slide playfully and carelessly down

her back.

The main attributes of María’s personality, which are also highlighted in some of the characters in

Manuela and illustrated in several watercolors produced by the Comisión Corográfica, correspond to the usual

categories used to convey femininity in the nineteenth century. Studying American womanhood in the period

between 1820 and 1860, Barbara Welters identifies four “cardinal virtues” associated to women: piety, purity,

submissiveness, and domesticity. 59 Luz Hincapié similarly explains that the Colombian woman of the

nineteenth century was seen and portrayed in four categories that were in perfect harmony with her domestic

being, expected to belong naturally inside the home: virgin, angel, flower, and frailty.60 Hincapié’s categories

emerge from Mary Louise Pratt’s study of gender and her identification of the main elements that have been

used to portray femininity and the role of women in society throughout history, including symbols that are

culturally available and can evoke multiple representations, such as the Virgin Mary.61 This chapter explores

these representations of the ideal Colombian woman as a home-based being, as a virgin and an angel, as a

beautiful and pure flower, and as docile, even infantile. The analysis begins with a comparison between the

female protagonists of the works studied in this thesis with Virgin Mary, followed by the juxtaposition of

these women to the purest flowers available for authors of the time. Subsequently, the chapter identifies the

58 Jaime Jaramillo Uribe.

59 Barbara Welters, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 152.
60 Luz Hincapié: 287-307.
61 Mary Louise Pratt, “Género y ciudadanía: las mujeres en diálogo con la nación,” Esplendores y miserias del siglo XIX. Cultura y sociedad en América Latina,

eds. González Stephan et al. (Caracas: Monte Ávila, 1995).

26
characterization of these female heroines through qualities shared with other deities and saintly beings, such

as angels and goddesses from Classical antiquity.

Hail Mary, Full of Grace

The most important legacy of the Spanish dominance in Colombia is, without doubt, Catholicism. This

religion helped create a national identity for Colombia in juxtaposition to European nations, while

perpetuating ideas of class distinction and “Otherness” and came to represent civilization in opposition to

pagan savageness.62 Despite the seemingly endless amount of writing and philosophizing against the religion

and of all the different movements that tried to reduce the power of the Church in the country throughout

the nineteenth century, by 1886, when the first long-lasting national Constitution was adopted, most of the

Colombian population was tied to the Catholic Church. Moreover, priests in the different regions of the

country had a great power over their communities, where, through their mass sermons, they instructed the

population on particular beliefs and ways of being, with particular emphasis on politics, behavior and

appearances.63

It is, therefore, unsurprising that the ideal of femininity entailed the modeling of women’s

personalities after the Virgin Mary. And if there is one character in nineteenth-century Colombian literature

that embodies this ideal, it is María. Her resemblance to the Catholic Virgin is made explicit throughout the

novel and begins, quite obviously, with her own name. Furthermore, Isaacs insists strongly in the physical

resemblance between the two, for example, when she places a light “cerca de aquella bella imagen de la

Virgen que tanto se le parecía” (close to that beautiful image of the Virgin that so much resembled her, 64).

María’s character is often juxtaposed to the Catholic Virgin throughout the novel. This comparison that

becomes especially evidenced in her extreme veneration and close relationship with the purest symbol of

Catholicism; a veneration that, at times, is so intense that it even seems narcissistic.64 Isaacs continues the

62 Felipe Gracia Pérez, Hijos de la Madre Patria: El hispanoamericanismo en la construcción de la identidad nacional colombiana durante la Regeneración (1878-1900)
(Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2011), 71.
63 See Palacios & Safford, McGreevey, and Gracia Pérez.
64 Doris Sommer, 193.

27
association between María with the Virgin throughout the novel, a comparison that culminates in the

description of the heroine’s deathbed, where:

…vestida de gro blanco y recostada en el ataúd, mostraba en su rostro algo de sublime resignación. La luz de
los cirios brillando en su frente tersa y sobre sus anchos párpados, proyectaba la sombra de sus pestañas sobre
sus mejillas: aquellos labios pálidos parecían haberse helado cuando intentaba sonreír… Sombreábanle la
garganta las trenzas medio envueltas en una toca de gasa blanca, y entre las manos, descansándole sobre el
pecho, sostenía un crucifijo.

(…dressed in white gro65 and lying in the coffin, she showed a sublime resignation in her face. The light of the
altar candles, shining over her smooth forehead and her broad eyelids, projected the shade of her eyelashes
upon her cheeks: those pale lips seemed to have been frozen as she was trying to smile… Shading her throat
were the braids, half-wrapped in a veil of white gauze, and in her hands, resting over her chest, she held a
crucifix. 266-7)

Holding a crucifix in her hands, María is only able to half-smile, probably happy to be going back to Heaven,

where she seems to belong, but also possibly lamenting the death of a child she was never able to procreate.

María’s premature death before marriage and childbearing is a perfect example of the “death of a beautiful

woman, cherished in fiction,” which, as Welters is keen to explain, “represented the woman as the innocent

victim, suffering without sin, too pure and good for this world but too weak and passive to resist its evil

forces.”66 The purity of María’s character is also symbolized in both her “pale lips” and the white fabrics (gro

and gauze) that make up her dress, both elements perfectly fulfilling the ideal of virginal whiteness that was so

often associated with femininity in nineteenth-century Colombia.

This idea of pure whiteness is seen repeatedly in Colombian portrayals of femininity during the

nineteenth century. Heroines in novels and short stories, and in all types of artwork, are often seen wearing

this color, representing the purity of their character. For example, in María, the characters of Rufina, Lucía,

and Tránsito also often wear white chemises, which are described as “clean” and “unordinary.” Manuela is

also described as wearing a white muslin petticoat every once in a while in the novel. This white dress,

however, as José María Vergara y Vergara insists in his “Revista de la moda” (Fashion Magazine),

no puede ser sumamente fino; su mérito consiste en la blancura y en el corte del traje, que es una túnica cerrada
desde el cuello, de donde bajan muchos pliegues … Las mangas llegan a la muñeca y el traje hasta el pie, pero
no hasta el suelo; es decir, que la cola está abolida.

65 Gro was a textile made of coarse silk.

66 Barbara Welters, 162.

28
 (cannot be extremely fine; its merit consists in the whiteness and the cut of the dress, which is a closed tunic
from the neck, from where the draping falls … The sleeves go to the wrist and the dress to the foot, but not to
the floor; meaning that the tail is abolished.)67

Dress was, therefore, meant to convey womanly virtue in its whiteness, protect her honor by covering the

skin, and avoid the lavishness of luxury by only using the

necessary amount of fabric. Such an idea is clearly evidenced in

Carmelo Fernández’s drawing Socorro, Notables de la Capital (Fig.

1), which portrays an upper-class woman of the province of

Socorro, wearing her most pure white dress and a shawl,

covering herself all the way down from the neck, in her best

virginal performance: her honor protected from the gaze of the

two men posing behind her thanks to her choice of clothing.

As virtuous and saintly beings, women were expected

to engage in the type of activities that, throughout the history

of Catholicism, had been associated with the Virgin Mary:

Figure 1. Carmelo Fernández. Socorro, Notables de la

isolated inside the home and performing a variety of domestic
Capital, 1850. Watercolor on paper, 29 x 21 cm.
Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia duties that included taking care of children, picking up flowers

and creating bouquets meant to brighten up the house, and engaging in needlework. María, for instance, is

portrayed as taking care of the youngest child in the family, even though she is not his mother, who was still

alive. María is also seen in the mother’s chamber, “bordando … [oyendo] sin dejar sus labores” (embroidering

… listening without quitting their duties, 16-17). Not only embroidering, but needlework of all sorts,

including spinning, sewing and knitting as well, have been shown as part of Virgin Mary’s daily activities

within Catholic tradition.68 “Embroidery improved taste; knitting promoted serenity and the economy.”69

Needlework taught women patience, the ability to listen without commenting or giving their opinions, and

67 José María Vergara y Vergara, “Revista de la moda,” in Museo de Cuadro de Costumbres Tomo V (Bogotá: F. Mantilla, 1886), accessed 18 December
2015, http://www.banrepcultural.org/blaavirtual/literatura/cosiv/cosiv29.htm.
68 See, for example, Jacqueline Musacchio, Art, Marriage, and Family in the Florentine Renaissance Palace (Singapore: The Getty Foundation, 2008) or Andrea

Bayer (ed.) Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008).
69 Barbara Welters, 165.

29
provided them an occupation while accompanying their husbands in their business activities at home. This

ability to listen, to accept the decisions of the lover without asking for anything, or without complaining

about her suffering, are characteristic for María.

Other somewhat more liberal types of feminine activities in which women could engage were

considered acceptable at times. For example, don Demóstenes, narrator of Manuela, mentions how ladies of

good taste should engage exclusively in the creation of artwork—painting, drawing and coloring on paper—

“un oficio muy digno de las finas manos de una señorita” (a very deserving task of the hands of a miss, 120).

In a similar fashion, always keen to instruct women in appropriate behavior, José María Vergara y Vergara

recommends in his “Consejos a una niña” (Advice to a girl) that women engage in delicate and silent labors

that can be done inside the home.70 Although women were not expected to work, when the socio-economic

situations of their families required them to, they would work in typically “feminine” labors, of which textile

manufacture and production of dress were the most important.71 Two of the drawings by Manuel María Paz

(Fig. 2 and Fig. 3), illustrate a woman weaving fabric and two women making a straw hat, showing the type of

domestic labors in which the Colombian woman was expected to engage, even in the cases when she was

required to work for profit. The different settings for his drawings—one set in what seems to be like a rural

home in Pasto and the other in a more urban or interior setting in Neiva—show the existence of different

values regarding the appropriateness of needlework as an acceptable form of work for women.

70 José María Vergara y Vergara, “Consejos a una niña,” in Las Tres Tazas y otros cuadros (Bogotá: Editorial Minerva, 1936), 133-142.
71 William Paul McGreevey.

30
 Figure 2. Manuel María Paz. Tejedora: Provincia de Pasto, 1853. Figure 3. Manuel María Paz. Tejedoras de sombreros de jipijapa:
Watercolor on paper, 24 x 34 cm. Biblioteca Nacional de Privincia de Neiva, 1857. Watercolor on paper, 23 x 31 cm.
Colombia Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia

All of these womanly tasks were meant to enhance their chastity and purity, keeping them busy inside

the home, and away from mundane temptations that could include fashion, spending and—God forbid—

loosening their values and sacrificing their morality. Women were taught to stay on the right path of morality

and avoiding falling into inappropriate, or even sinful, behaviors, in order to maintain the honor of their

families. Thus, it was frequently seen how girls were:

…educadas según los usos del alto tono y con toda la modestia de unas vestales… La madre que tuvo la dicha
de conducir tales hermosuras al punto céntrico de la virtud, por en medio de los peligros de la sociedad, fue la
señora … muy digna esposa… El tema de su enseñanza era la piedad con dignidad, y para esto les tenía escrito
de su propia mano un manual cuyos principales capítulos eran los contenidos en este catálogo:
I. No exhibirse demasiado.
II. No abusar de los privilegios de la coquetería.
III. No dejarse tratar de sus apasionados, como ellos tratarían a las mujeres de mala nota.
IV. No reírse sino de lo que es risible.
V. No quererse distinguir por el lujo de los trajes.

(…educated according to the uses of the high tone and with all the modesty of vestals… The mother that had
the good fortune of conducting such beauties to the centric point of virtue, amidst the dangers of society, was
the lady … very respectable wife… The topic of her teaching was piety with dignity, and for this she had
written of her own hand a manual whose main chapters were those contained in this catalogue:
I. Do not exhibit yourself too much.
II. Do not abuse of the privileges of coquetry.
III. Do not let your suitors treat you like they would treat women of bad note.

31
 IV. Do not laugh other than of what is laughable.
V. Do not wish to be distinguished by the luxury of clothes. 138)

Not only were mothers expected to be respectable wives and engage in the bringing up of their children, but

they were also considered to feel fortunate of having the responsibility of doing so. In order to educate girls,

the use of manuals illustrating the manners and ways of behavior that women were expected to follow, such

as the one exemplified above, was common. Although some of them might have been created within the

home, others were formally published, distributed, and sold throughout the country, even through the

twentieth century. One of the most popular examples was the Compendio del Manual de Urbanidad y Buenas

Maneras, written by Miguel Antonio Carreño, which instructed both women and men in their duties towards

God, themselves, and the rest of the society, as well as on aspects of urbanism, including aspects of hygiene

and norms of behavior inside and outside the home.72 Another very important way of educating women on

manners and appropriate behaviors was through letters, written often by male members of the family, in

which they were instructed on how to be virtuous women and good wives, as José María Vergara y Vergara’s

“Consejos a una niña,” where he gives the female reader advice on appropriate womanly behavior as a

virtuous wife.73

Besides engaging in dignified domestic duties and following the norms of good manners and

behavior, women could protect their honor by wearing the appropriate clothes. As the quote from Manuela

illustrates, they were not expected to exhibit their bodies too much, nor were they meant to wear fashionable

and luxurious clothes; they should, additionally, be careful not to abuse their powers of coquetry, smile too

much, or be too permissible with men. The idea of women having to cover their bodies fully from the neck

down, sometimes even including the hair and neck, in the best virginal fashion, is evidenced in several

drawings of the Comisión Corográfica, including the two watercolors by Carmelo Fernández in figures 4 and 5.

Family honor was further heightened by childbearing, a female quality that, since the Renaissance,

has signified the most virtuous type of femininity in Catholic imaginary, where motherhood was perfectly

accomplished in Virgin Mary: bringing the savior to the world was her mission in life, and her chastity and

72 Miguel Antonio Carreño, Compendio del Manual de Urbanidad y Buenas Maneras (Bogotá: Editorial Voluntad, 1961).
73 José María Vergara y Vergara, “Consejos a una niña.”

32
purity made her, and only her, deserve this privilege.74 Despite dying a virgin, María manages to embody the

divinely maternal character of the Virgin by taking care of the youngest child in the family. This idea of

motherhood, of upbringing and nurturing children, is present in a variety of nineteenth-century sources that

were meant to educate young women in their duties as wives. Perhaps one of the most significant sources

comes from the hand of Vergara y Vergara in his “Consejos a una niña,” where he argues that the woman’s

natural place is the home, the only place where she can fully embody her delicate virtue, where she could

become the queen of the household by complementing the public, laboring masculinity of her husband.75

This idea, as most of Vergara y Vergara’s writing, can be traced back to Antiquity, although it is most

likely that he was mainly influenced by the writings of Rousseau during the times of the French Revolution,

from where most of the ideas on womanhood and motherhood as the most virtuous representation of

Figure 4. Carmelo Fernández. Tunja, Notables de la Figure 5. Carmelo Fernández. Vélez, Notables de la
Capital, 1851. Watercolor on paper, 20 x 30 cm. Capital, 1850. Watercolor on paper, 21 x 30 cm.
Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia

74 See Jacqueline Musacchio and Andrea Bayer for references.

75 José María Vergara y Vergara, “Consejos a una niña.”

33
femininity in nineteenth-century Colombia were inherited. During the early years of the Revolution, Aileen

Ribeiro explains, men of all kinds were encouraged to participate in political discussions to shape the future

of the country, while women were consistently left out of the political debate, only allowed to participate in

extraordinary circumstances when they proved to be needed.76 Most of the philosophers of the Revolution

agreed in the relegation of women outside the political sphere and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s thought

dominated in the matter. According to Rousseau, politically active women were distasteful: a woman was

inherently a being of the home and should be in charge only of motherhood and the bringing up of “Citizens

of Virtue” that would ensure a bright future for the new republic. 77 Philosophers of the French

Enlightenment, and particularly those who wrote in the times of the Revolution, were particularly important

in the Independence of Colombia from Spain, as they inspired the thought of most of the leaders of the

movement. Their influence, as can be seen in Jaramillo Uribe’s El pensamiento colombiano en el siglo XIX,

continued throughout the century and their work influenced philosophical thought in Colombia in different

aspects of politics, including the notion of womanhood promoted by Rousseau, which came to shape the

notion of femininity in nineteenth-century Colombia as well.

The relegation of women to the home, a measure that also prevented them from demanding more

political freedom, helped shape the position that women would have to adopt in the nineteenth-century

Colombian society. This is why María is “kept hostage in the home,”78 in charge of domestic tasks and only

going out in the company of one of the male members of the family. The prohibition of female participation

in politics, on the other hand, is perfectly embodied in the voice of one of the villains in Manuela, where he

claims: “Un cura metido en la política de la parroquia es como si una mujer se metiese a leer la Recopilación

granadina” (A priest taking part in the politics of the parish is as if a woman read the Granadine Recopilation,

408). As abhorrent as it is to see a priest influencing the politics of a liberal nation, so is the idea of a woman

reading one of the most important political texts of the time; for women were not meant to engage in any of

76 Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion in the French Revolution (New York: Holmes & Meiers Publishers, Inc., 1988), 87.
77 Joan B. Landes, “Embodiments of Female Virtue,” Visualizing the nation: Gender, representation and revolution in eighteenth-century France (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2001), 101.
78 Term borrowed from Barbara Welter.

34
the nation-building tasks, except to educate the most virtuous citizens that would continue through the path

of glory and ensure the future of the free nation.

The Flower of Femininity

Instead of engaging in political debates, women were meant to engage in more feminine activities, which

included the duties corresponding to the virginal domesticity explained above and included a singular affinity

with flowers. In visual and literary representations of womanhood, this affinity reflected the delicacy and

purity of the flowers that surrounded representations of women. Flowers are meant to be pure and sweet, a

perfect combination with a woman’s innocence. Vergara y Vergara, for example, compares marriage to a

“cadena de flores” (chain of flowers) that gives woman the opportunity to reign.79 The association between

women and flowers, as well as the affinity women were expected to have towards the culturing of flowers,

reflected the status of a woman as a servant. This is clearly portrayed in María, when she “humiliates herself

as a slave” to pick up the flowers that Efraín had tossed away (31).

However, flowers also represent the blossom of life, which could be directly associated with fertility

and childbearing, the most virtuous outcome of femininity. María, for example, collects flowers to arrange

them into centerpieces that decorate the house; she also cultures some of her favorite types and even wears

them. As was already mentioned, when the narrator introduces María, she wears a carnation, symbol of pride

and beauty, on her hair. She is also often found wearing “una rosa salpicada aun de rocío… sobre las gruesas

y lucientes trenzas” (a rose splashed with dew… over the thick and shining braids, 136). As most flowers,

roses are a symbol of gentility and femininity, of elegance, refinement, and even a mystical nature.80 These

characteristics are not only worn by María in her delicate accessories, usually placed on her hair, but are also

directly used as metaphors of her beauty: “Ella, ríendo con su compañera, hundía las mejillas más frescas que

las rosas, en el tazón rebosante…” (Laughing with her friend, she submerged her cheeks, fresher than roses,

in the overflowing bowl…, 16). Here, the roses describe the natural blush on her cheeks, while also reflecting

79 José María Vergara y Vergara, “Consejos a una niña”

80 “Rose Color Meanings,” Teleflora, accessed 28 December 2016, http://www.teleflora.com/floral-facts/rose-color-meaning.

35
the liveliness of the character—a sort of childishness that makes María the perfect embodiment of

nineteenth-century Colombian ideals of feminine beauty. Her happiness and freshness, which might seem to

be too much for María, given the tragic future that awaits her, are also described by the idea of an

overflowing bowl, which embodies the overflowing happiness and liveliness of the heroine in this moment.

But perhaps the most interesting comparison of María to a flower occurs when she falls ill: “Pero,

¿qué es lo que ha tenido la niña? Yo la vi ayer a la pasada tan fresca y lucida como siempre. Parecía botón de

rosa de Castilla” (But what has happened to the girl? I saw her yesterday as fresh and lucid as always. She

looked like a bud of a Castile rose, 65). Also known as rosa gallica or French rose, the Castile rose associates

María directly with Spain, with the Mother Country that once ruled a Colonial New Granada, and that left so

many traces behind. The Castile rose positions María very clearly as a white woman, member of the civilized,

Hispanicized, Colombian elite. It also reveals, indirectly, what the project of miscegenation, so vivid in

political writings of the time, though absent in reality, was meant to achieve. For as Gracia Pérez argues, in

the second half of the nineteenth century, miscegenation in Colombia was, more than clearly, a project of

whitening of its peoples.81 This, in turn, finds a more direct expression in the so desired civilization of the

country, a civilization that, for centuries, had been linked with the Spanish Colonial rule and its legacy. It is

not surprising, therefore, to find

Europeanized subjects in the drawings of

the Comisión Corográfica, one of the most

interesting examples being Henry Price’s

drawing Medellín (Fig. 6) which seems to

be based more on the aristocratic elites of

one of the European capitals than in the

bourgeoisies of Medellín.

Figure 6. Henry Price. Medellín, 1852. Watercolor on paper, 29 x 21 cm.

Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia

81 Felipe Gracia Pérez.

36
 The idea of a civilized woman, despite her ignorance in matters of science and politics, is also

important in the creation of nineteenth-century Colombian ideals of femininity. This is explained by Isaacs in

the idea of a shod Virgin Mary, when Efraín is able to see in María “…sus pies primorosamente calzados: su

paso ligero y digno revelaba todo el orgullo, no abatido, de nuestra raza, y el seductivo recato de la virgen

cristiana” (…her perfectly shod feet: her light and dignified pace revealed all the unabated pride of our race,

and the seductive demureness of the Christian virgin, 17). The mention of shoes here is meant to heighten

the woman; they help her pace be as light as possible, bringing her even closer to Heaven, the place where she

naturally belonged. Díaz Castro further explores this idea of wearing—or not—shoes in Manuela, where he

explicitly divides the nation into two classes: the shod and the barefoot, where the former clearly represents

the “civilized” elite and the former the “savage” lower classes, establishing a direct parallel with the idea of

dressed/civilized versus undressed/savage of the colonial period introduced by Regina Root.82

Isaacs specifically places María as one of “our race” in the quote above, where the word “our” is

meant to describe “fair skin as one of the foremost standards of feminine beauty,”83 one that the Holy Virgin

herself fully represents. This is most explicitly metaphorized in María’s “tez de azucena” (complexion of a

white lily), which represents her whiteness. María’s whiteness makes her beautiful not only because white is

the color of virtue and purity, but also because it is the color of a superior race that is meant to rule

Colombia. Her immaculate whiteness alludes, yet again, to the project of whitening that miscegenation

connoted at this time. The choice of white lilies, however, is very interesting for the various meanings they

convey. In Christian art, they are symbols of innocence, purity, and chastity, often associated with the Holy

Virgin, as queen of Heavens, herself.”84 But lilies are also frequently associated with funerals, and “symbolize

that the soul of the departed has received restored innocence after death.”85 Curiously, these white lilies are

the flowers María chooses to dissect in order to send them along with the letters she promises to write to

Efraín while he studies abroad in Paris. It is as if she was trying to remind her love of her necessary death, as

82 Regina A. Root.
83 Susan Hiner, 110.
84 “A Primer to Catholic Symbolism,” Boston Catholic Journal, accessed 10 January 2016, http://www.boston-catholic-journal.com/a-primer-to-catholic-

symbolism.htm.
85 “Meaning and Symbolism of Lilies,” Teleflora, accessed 10 January 2016, http://www.teleflora.com/meaning-of-flowers/lily.

37
a witness of her eternal innocence, even if this meant that their love would never be consummated. But lilies

are also an allegory from Classical Greece, where they were believed to have “sprouted from the milk of

Hera, the queen of the gods.” 86 Seeing lilies in relation to Hera clearly continues an ideal of virtuous

motherhood and white purity, but it also positions the ideal woman as a mythological creature, too good to

exist in this world, and brings femininity into a whole new sphere.

From Catholic Tradition to Deities of Antiquity

Despite Virgin Mary being the main example in the shaping of femininity, other mythological beings and

deities also played an important role in the shaping of an ideal feminine type in nineteenth-century Colombia,

with angels and allusions to Classical antiquity of particular importance. Although Isaacs uses comparisons

with nymphs from antiquity as an insinuation of the misbehavior in women, allusions to Greco-Roman

deities were often used to portray the ideal characteristics that women should develop, a femininity that was

so pure that it deserved to be heightened by comparing it only with the most beautiful mythological creatures.

Joan Landes argues that “the representation of women as goddesses symbolized the regeneration of the

tainted female body associated with the repudiated old order”87 in the times of the French Revolution. Her

ideas can be translated directly to the labor of Nation-building in nineteenth-century Colombia, where the

images of female goddesses were used by republicans to represent a group of supernatural creatures that

reflected the qualities expected of both the new republic and the virtuous citizens that were part of it and

form an important part within what Lynn Hunt calls the iconographic tradition of the “feminine civic

allegory.”88 Such an allegory is a direct attempt to compensate women for their absence in the revolutionary

and Nation-building causes and a way of materializing the republican ideal of the woman at home. Thus, “by

incorporating the very symbol of the Revolution as a female figure, compensation was made for the exclusion

86 “Meaning and Symbolism of Lilies.”

87 Joan B. Landes, “Embodiments of Female Virtue,” Visualizing the nation: Gender, representation and revolution in eighteenth-century France (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2001), 130.
88 Lynn Hunt, “Hercules and the Radical Image in the French Revolution,” Representations, 2 (1983), 98.

38
of women from the Revolution’s political practice. Stated otherwise, women were included but only in

representation.”89

Allusions to Classical beauty and femininity in nineteenth-century Colombia are explicitly portrayed

in the clothing of female characters through the use of white and of textiles that drape the body, such as

muslin. Such textiles are closely related to Classical Antiquity and imitate the draping of fabrics around the

body from the time and, as Anne Hollander explains,

From the storehouse of Greek prototypes comes the Western awareness of the scope of beauty possible to the
clothed body when its ‘natural’ is created and exalted by art. Those ideal, rhetorical, but always apparently
casual arrangements of limbs, torsos and folds set a standard, not just for later artistic practitioners but for
perceiving eyes of later centuries.90

The use of neo-classical dress and of light fabrics such as muslin, which would drape around the body in a

fashion similar to that of dresses of Classical Antiquity, have thus been used frequently in fashion and art to

convey certain ideals of femininity. The garments that drape almost naturally around the body suggest an ideal

of natural beauty inspired on the women of Classical Antiquity, which is also used to promote an ideal of a

woman that does not wear makeup or any other artifices that might help her hide her natural character. By

using another allegory to ancient mythology, Isaacs criticizes the Parisian undines, who “se pintan las mejillas

con zumos de flores rojas, y se ponen corsé y botines…” (paint their cheeks with squashed red flowers and

wear corset and booties…, 196). The use of a corset, which would damage the natural beauty of a woman was

strictly prohibited, as was the use of any type of make up on their faces. The use of makeup and other

artifices is constantly associated with witches, vipers, and evil in both María and Manuela. But perhaps the

most interesting case against makeup is provided by José María Vergara y Vergara, in his “Revista de la

moda,” where he tells women to wear on their faces only their natural (virginal) virtues instead of the artifice

of makeup.

Natural beauty, finally, is associated with youth and with angels, those purely spiritual beings that

tend to be associated with children in Christian art tradition. As Grace Greenwood explains, “True feminine

89 Joan B. Landes, 132.

90 Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), xiii.

39
genius … is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetual childhood.”91 In María, childishness is

conveyed in the words of Efraín, who was not only her fiancé, but also her teacher: “pude valuar toda la

inteligencia de María: mis frases quedaban grabadas indeleblemente en su memoria, y su comprensión se

adelantaba casi siempre con triunfo infantil a mis explicaciones” (I could fully value María’s intelligence: my

phrases were indelibly recorded in her memory and her comprehension almost always anticipated my

explanations with infantile triumph, 33). Her obedience, in both listening her tutor and learning his teachings,

as well as her “infantile triumph” evidence how she, as the embodiment of the feminine ideal, represents the

exemplary school child.

But childhood, and especially in its association with angels, also signifies playfulness. María is often

seen playing with flowers, with leaves, with her braids, and many of the decorative elements that surround

descriptions of the heroine are also often described as playful themselves. María’s feet would often be found

“[jugando] con la alfombra” (playing with the mat) inside the house, or carefully smashing leaves; she would

also often engage in mischievous activities, such as running out of the house and climbing a little hill, where

the wind would make her skirt flutter. Sometimes she would even allow her feet to be bare or her shawl to

slide and reveal a little too much of her shoulders and chest. But perhaps the most important aspect of

María’s childishness, and the playfulness that came along with it, were her braids. Braids were a hairstyle

widely used in Colombia during the late nineteenth century, typically among the middle and lower classes of

the countryside and young girls, and most of the “barefoot” female characters in Manuela also style their hair

in braids. But María’s braids seemed to have their own personality, despite being an attempt to control unruly

hair, and they were so important that she even demanded them to be cut from her dead corpse to be given to

her mourning husband-to-be, who finds them to be almost sensible to his kisses when he finds them upon

his arrival at his father’s estate after María’s death.

María’s braids are introduced by the author in his initial description of the character, quoted at the

beginning of this chapter, and she wears her hair in this manner almost daily until she is found lying on her

91 Grace Greenwood (Sara Jane Clarke), quoted in Welter, 160.

40
deathbed at the end of the novel. In fact, María’s braids are present even after she dies. But the description of

María’s braids changes often and reveals the playful pushing of boundaries that she sometimes engages in.

One important characteristic of María’s braids is that they are often undone, reflecting moments of insecurity,

despair, even craziness: “María sentada sobre la alfombra, sobre la cual resaltaba el blanco de su ropaje, dio

un débil grito al sentirme, volviendo a dejar caer la cabeza destrenzada sobre el asiento…” (María, seating on

the mat over which her white clothing stood out, gave a weak shriek when she felt me, dropping her

unbraided head over the chair…, 233). This moment reveals the weakness of the female character, her

necessity of attention from a male lover, especially as it shows María’s understanding that her illness was

associated with the separation from Efraín. As Sommer is keen to explain, María’s character is one of

primitive and uncontrolled femininity and she suffers until the end of her days because Efraín is too weak to

confront his father and break old colonial habits—as most of the men engaged in the creation of the

Colombian republic did throughout the nineteenth century and, I would argue, continue today. As a result,

María, the innocent heroine, has to die, in great part, because she:

…lacked ‘manly’ dignity and self-control. Therefore the very liberties she took with feminine propriety, liberties
that seemed to ally her with other romantic heroines, slip dangerously on a closer reading into the ‘barbarity’ of
uncontrolled femaleness… she wept too easily, spoke her mind, initiated flirtations, went outside barefoot, and
literally trembled with passion. In short, she revealed her inferior undomesticated gender…92

Fortunately, though, María is not the only model of ideal femininity that Colombian women of the nineteenth

century could follow. The liberties María took might have been too much for her to handle, thus conducing

her to her death, but they were not for Manuela. Contrary to María, Manuela seems to have been conduced to

her deathbed precisely because she abandoned the liberties that she often took—although Díaz Castro never

makes this idea explicit. Indeed, as I intend to demonstrate in the following chapter, disarrangement, innocent

savageness, and the playful character of angels, offer an opportunity for subversion of feminine ideals, which

could be used as a weapon for female empowerment by the most intelligent Colombian women.

92 Doris Sommer, 199.

41
 III

FALLEN ANGEL, SAVAGE NATURE

Within Catholic tradition, the highest level of virtue that woman could achieve was to become the

embodiment of Virgin Mary herself. But by achieving her most virginal, pure, and innocent self, a woman

also lived in the shadow of Eve, for a woman’s ability to tempt the male sex has been feared ever since the

expulsion from Paradise. Similarly, if angels were innocent little beings, they also conveyed the image of the

Devil, the angel that was expelled from Heaven, and angelical mischief was always prone to fall into

misbehavior, a menace fully represented in the Biblical tale of the Devil himself. Through casually slipping

shawls, playful bare feet, and dancing, unbraided hairs, Colombian artists and authors of the nineteenth

century opened the possibility for women to push the boundaries of appropriate feminine behavior, thus

finding an opportunity for subversion of strict gender roles in a patriarchal society.

The sight of female skin, so rare in María and strictly forbidden in most manuals of manners,93 is

quite common in the novel by Díaz Castro. The reader meets Manuela for the first time while she is washing

clothes,

…soltando sus pensamientos y su voz, mientras concluía su tarea. Los pies desnudos entre el agua, el pelo
suelto, y cubierta con unas enaguas de fula azul que bajaban desde los hombros hasta las rodillas (…chingado) y
el cuerpo desdoblado para sumegir la ropa en el agua.

(…loosening her thoughts and her voice, while she finished her duty. The bare feet inside the water, the hair
loose, and covered with an underskirt of blue fabric that went from the shoulders to the knees (chingado) and
the body unfolded to submerge the clothes in the water. 36)

This scene was so uncommon to the nineteenth-century Colombian elite that the narrator even describes it as

a spectacle. That Manuela’s bare feet are described as “naked” is a direct allusion to her body’s nudity, even

more so because her legs can even be seen up to her knees—a complete scandal in a time where even the

sight of ankles was scolded by moralists of all kinds. Furthermore, the act of “loosening” her thoughts, which

were being spoken out loud and could be heard by any passerby, including don Demóstenes himself, might

93 Examples of manuals include the short example that appears in Manuela (introduced in the previous chapter).

42
have been a direct reference to the loose morals that she could be read to represent. In the nineteenth

century, women were not expected to think at all, they were not expected to produce any thoughts of their

own, an idea that can be traced easily from the fact that it was men who controlled what they read, what they

saw, what they did. If a woman was able to think, it should apply to the domestic tasks that they were meant

to engage in, focused on the maintenance of the home and the bringing up of children. But seeing a woman,

like Manuela, thinking out loud in a public place, where anyone around her can hear her thoughts, is highly

unusual. Hiding her thoughts behind a domestic duty, that of laundering, Díaz Castro presents a woman who

is able to speak her mind, a woman who could be more than just the imposed domestic duties, if she would

dare to make that decision.

After this first description of Manuela, the reader soon understands that she only wears her

underwear at this point, when both don Demóstenes, male narrator of the novel, and the reader, most likely a

woman, meet her for the first time. But even when she gets fully dressed, “el pañolón encarnado que ella se

puso por debajo de su negro y rizado pelo, [dejó] los hombros a medio cubrir” (the red shawl that she wore

under her black and curly hair left her shoulders only half-covered, 40). Not even when fully dressed is

Manuela’s skin completely covered. As can be seen in this example, the use of a shawl, so highly

recommended by moralists of the time to hide any possible sight of the woman’s body and thus avoid

provoking any sort of sexual temptations in the male viewer, did not necessarily indicate a full covering of the

body. This idea, I believe, can be read as a rather satirical comment that Díaz Castro throws at the authors of

manuals of manners: no matter how many behavioral rules they impose, there will be a chance for people to

appropriate them as their own, leaving an open opportunity for women, especially, to subvert the rules.

Moreover, Díaz Castro seems to, in a way, invite women to take part in this type of subversion,

playing with the theme until the final page of his book. Through descriptions of the dress of characters that

have appropriated dress etiquette as their own, and who have managed to subvert the strict rules of dressing

introduced by Vergara y Vergara and other moralists of the time, Díaz Castro provides a space for the female

reader to engage in the performance of a different type of femininity, one that turns out to be strikingly

43
different from the virginal character evidenced in Isaac’s María. Of special interest is the lack of commentary

by don Demóstenes—whose voice could be read as Díaz Castro’s own, due to the bibliographical similarities

between the two—when seeing that the female characters in Manuela fail to embody the nineteenth-century

ideal of virginal and domestic femininity. This absence of commentary on the inappropriate behavior of

female characters is striking, as the voice of the male narrator tends to be always willing to comment, most

often criticizing, the social situation, the power of the Church and of gamonales—local landlords that also had

political control over the territory—in the village, and even the government itself. Although not directly

advising women to rebel against the patriarchy, Díaz Castro does introduce important opportunities for

female empowerment, which could be easily appropriated and embodied by the female readers of his novel

that were clever enough to understand the implicit meanings of his words.

Díaz Castro introduces the potential for subversion of femininity through his descriptions of dress in

most of his characters but the case of Manuela is particularly interesting. Being the protagonist of the novel,

Manuela becomes a clear example for the female reader to follow, and her “loosened” dress etiquette

becomes a direct referral to her failure to embody the virginal ideal of femininity expected of the nineteenth-

century Colombian woman. But this failure, evidenced in the dress of the female characters, can also be

traced, though less directly, in María and even in some of the watercolors of the Comisión Corográfica. A clever

woman would notice the clear deviances from the virginal type of femininity that predominated at the time

and, most importantly, she would be able, through her individual agency, to play with them in the same way

that their female heroines did, to push the boundaries of strict dress etiquette and moral codes, and to

construct a new type of femininity. By following the examples of these heroines who subverted traditional

types of womanhood, the female reader would, in a way, be empowered herself, thus reconstructing the

gendered notions of Colombianness that predominated at this moment of the nation-building project.

This chapter explores how, through the pushing the boundaries of what was meant to be appropriate

womanly behavior, an opportunity for subversion of the gender ideal could be opened. The “savageness” of

some women allowed for their potential empowerment; their ignorance—which was, in a sense at least,

44
expected of them—could become a doorway for their appropriation of the norms and a way to engage in

their own personal interpretations of the rules exposed by manuals of manners. This could lead, purposefully,

to ways of behavior that refused to comply with the virginal ideal of femininity imposed by a patriarchal

society, especially as communicated through dress. In order to study the potential for female empowerment

and the creation of a new type of womanhood, in María, Manuela, and the watercolors of the Comisión

Corográfica, this chapter begins by studying the portrayal of woman in relation to Eve, who embodied Original

Sin within Catholic tradition. Eve’s tendency towards sin, a weight that women would have to carry on their

shoulders throughout the nineteenth century, was a recurrent theme in literature, art, and manuals of

manners. It was dress, which, by covering the body, was meant to conceal all of Eve’s sins and bring her back

to her virginal state. But by playing with their dress, with the slipping shawls worn by the heroines, for

example, women would have an opportunity to embody as much of Eve as they would like to.

In a similar way, there exist a number of potential dangers associated with angels, especially as they

fail to embody their most pure selves, a theme that is studied in the second part of this chapter. The potential

empowerment of fallen angels, as I have chosen to call them, relies in their capacity of play, in their

innocence, which, hidden behind a mask of ignorance and so closely linked to what was expected from the

nineteenth-century Colombian woman, could allow for the breaking of the rules introduced by moralists.

These two symbols for potential empowerment, Eve and the angel, were implicit in most writings of the time,

but Díaz Castro seems to introduce a more direct example, a more visible opportunity for women to subvert

the boundaries of femininity, even when they were not so clever in reading between the lines. This is the final

section of the chapter, where I attempt to uncover the alternative characterization of femininity that is

described by Díaz Castro in his novel, and supported by the blank spaces left in the other works, which allow

women to push boundaries and subvert the virginal type of femininity.

Eve, the Jewish Traitor

That María was a Jew—just like the Virgin herself—is made clear from the moment we meet her, when

Efraín is keen to describe the beauty of her seductive eyes as typical of “her race” (14). Being Jewish is a

45
condition—a burden rather—that she would carry throughout her life and it is highlighted from this very first

introduction of the character and seen several times throughout the novel, for example, when Efraín’s father

carelessly teases her by directly calling her “Judía” (Jewess). The constant reminder of María’s Jewishness acts

as both a (possibly unwanted) souvenir of the religion of the divine mother of Christ and one of the tempting

seductiveness of Eve, the sinner. But, as Doris Sommer explains, it is also a symbol of “the unspeakable racial

difference in the plantation society, the difference between black and white. Jewishness … is a protean stigma

that damns the characters one way or another: as an enfeebled inbreeding ‘aristocracy’ like the planters and as

a racially different disturbance among the whites.”94 María’s Jewishness, just like her deadly infirmity itself,

dooms her family and ends up killing her; her femaleness also conditions her death.

The Jewish religion has been associated with treason since the inception of Catholicism, with Judas, a

Jew, betraying Jesus and causing his crucifixion—although, in fact, Jesus was also a Jew. In contemporary

Colombia, colloquial language links Jewish behavior (or a “Jewish move”) with deceiving someone, a concept

that carries the direct association between Jewishness and treason. Also according to Catholic tradition, as

presented in the biblical texts of the Ancient Testament, Eve, the mother of Jewish race, was also a traitor:

she allowed herself to be tempted by the devil himself and convinced Adam to bite the apple of sin, thus

betraying God himself. Beyond her close relationship with the Catholic Virgin, María was also a Jew and a

woman: she had the potential of becoming a perfect embodiment of Eve, the personification of hyper-

sensuality in Christian tradition. That her Jewishness is highlighted so often throughout the novel, therefore,

can be read as a reminder of how, more than Virgin Mary, María was meant to represent Eve. The two sides

of the woman, virgin and sinner, were essential aspects of her characterization and her failure to fully embody

either one could have been the inevitable cause for her death. María’s virginity, as projected through her

dress, was studied in the previous chapter; in this chapter, I study how María’s dangerous sensuality is traced

throughout the novel in her dress, in her failure to comply with appropriate womanly behavior and in her

seductively teasing childishness. The author’s choice of descriptive words is essential in the understanding of

María’s sensuality, where her “brazos deliciosamente torneados” (deliciously contoured arms, 14) reveal the

94 Doris Sommer, 173.

46
way in which María herself could provoke desire and the sensual tact of her “sombrero de terciopelo negro”

(black velvet hat, 136) directly conditions her own skin as something to be touched. María is also able to turn

into a sorceress, an “hechicera” (136) that allows Efraín’s arm to delicately touch hers, “desnudo de la

muselina y encajes de la manga” (naked from the muslin and the lace of the sleeve, 121), revealing, if only by

an instant, the seductive image of a nude María, who even lets him grab hold of her hand to kiss it. As is the

case with Manuela, it is particularly striking to see a complete absence of commentary from the author,

through any of the characters of the novel, to reject this type of behavior, as the moralists of the time such as

Vergara y Vergara would have done in any one of their texts.

Beyond the rare sight of her skin, María’s seductive nakedness is suggested even when she wears her

full dress:

Soñé que María era ya mi esposa: ese castísimo delirio había sido y debía continuar siendo el único deleite de mi
alma: vestía un traje blanco vaporoso, y llevaba un delantal azul, azul como si hubiese sido un jirón de cielo: era
aquel delantal que tantas veces le ayudé a atar tan linda y descuidadamente a su cintura inquieta, aquel en que
había yo encontrado envueltos sus cabellos: entreabrió cuidadosamente la puerta de mi cuarto, y procurando no
hacer ni el más leve ruido con sus ropajes, se arrodilló sobre la alfombra al pie del sofá… tocó mi frente con
sus labios suaves como el terciopelo de los lirios del Páez…

(I dreamt that María was already my wife: that chaste delirium had been and should have continued to be the
only delight of my soul: she was dressed in a vaporous white dress and she wore a blue apron, blue as if it had
been a shred of sky: it was that blue apron that I helped her tie beautifully and carelessly so many times around
her restless waist, that in which I had found her hairs wrapped: she half opened the door carefully, and trying
not to make the smallest sound with her clothing, she knelt over the rug at the foot of the sofa… she touched
my forehead with her lips, smooth like the velvet of the lilies of the Paez… 272)

The suggestion of a married María is, quite clearly, an allusion to the loss of her innocence, which would

inevitably happen with the consummation of her marriage. The consummation of the marriage, though never

mentioned explicitly in any of the nineteenth-century foundational novels, where even the slightest direct

reference to it would have created an immense scandal, is also suggested here by her entrance to the male

chamber, by the touch of her lips on Efraín’s forehead. Nakedness, and the sensuality surrounding the whole

act of consummation of the marriage, are here left for the imagination of the reader; but the direct allusion of

María’s sensually undressed body is also reflected in the dress itself, in the silence of her clothes—as if they

were completely absent from her body—and the apron that Efraín helps to tie. The process of getting

dressed inherently refers to the body underneath. Moreover, the fact that Efraín helps María get dressed, that

47
it is his hands that are covering, metaphorically, the nakedness of her body, clearly suggests the sensuality of

the whole act; it uncovers the sexual temptations caused by the body of Eve, thus staining María’s white and

pure virginal character. This dressing of María’s body, Efraín’s words reveal, his covering of her “restless

waist” with his hands, happened constantly, not only in his dreams, but during María’s life, thus showing a

possible alternative to the covered virginity of the body. The suggestion of the naked body, beyond pointing

to the sensuality embodied by Eve, also showed the clever female reader a way to act upon her own body, to

appropriate the norms of behavior, the codes of dress, and empower herself towards the construction of a

new type of femininity.

These sights of skin and the implicit suggestion of nudity might be rare in María, where the seductive

choice of words in Isaac’s descriptions could be—innocently at least—attributed to Chateaubriand’s

Romanticism that so much inspired the author, but not so much so in Manuela, where don Demóstenes so

often describes Manuela and her barefoot friends in savage states of half-dress that allow their skin and their

feet to show, to the scandal of Vergara y Vergara and other moralists of the time. Curiously enough, the

women that were portrayed to show the most skin were also less white and, as such, less pure than María.

Carmelo Fernández, for example, when portraying female types of white and mixed races of women (Fig. 7),

illustrates the former fully covered by her

shawl, while the others usually show at

least a small sight of their skin. Moreover,

it seems as though the amount of skin

showed increases with the darkness of her

skin; there seems to be a direct

relationship between race and the

looseness of morals, between race and the

ability to appropriate dress and subvert

the ideals of femininity. But with the Figure 7. Carmelo Fernández. Tejedoras y mercaderas de sombreros nacuma en
Bucaramanga. Tipos blanco, mestizo y zambo, 1850. Watercolor on paper, 23 x 30 cm.
Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia

48
miscegenation that had occurred by the second half of the nineteenth century, and with the pro-mixed race

discourse that prevailed in the political writings of the time, there was a space for women to be encouraged to

portray their less-white self, regardless of the color of the skin. And because the color of the skin had become

so insignificant, the use of the shawl and other accessories, either to cover or to uncover the body, was an

important tool in the subversion of the virginal standard of femininity and empowered women, if they so

wanted, to push the boundaries of femininity.

Beyond ideas of nudity and undress, female seductiveness is portrayed through the hair, through

those beautifully Colombian braids that are so often found undone, dancing and fluttering at the tune of the

wind. As was mentioned in the previous chapter, María’s braids were such an important part of her

characterization that they even seemed to have a life of their own after the heroine’s death. Braids, it could be

argued, were meant to tie up, quite literally, the unruliness of the woman, by controlling the unruliness of her

hair. But in many cases, even when the hair was tied in braids, it could have almost a life of its own and could

become an important means of seduction. In María’s case, for example: “Su cabellera rodaba destrenzada

hasta el suelo, y el viento hacía que algunos de sus bucles tocaran las blancas mosquetas de un rosal inmediato

… al sacudir ella la cabeza para arreglar la cabellera, sus miradas tenían una fascinación casi nueva…” (Her

hair glided braid-less to the floor and the wind made some of her curls touch the white hips of an immediate

rosebush … when she shook her hair to fix the hair, her regard had an almost new fascination…, 191).

María’s hair not only dared touch the purest of roses, but it also caressed her hips, a very clear and sexually

charged image. It is as if María’s hair is touching her seductively in replacement of the hands of the narrator,

as if this “new regard” of hers represented, if only metaphorically, the impossible consummation of the

relationship between the two lovers. Later in the novel, María’s daringly seductive hair, “conservando las

ondulaciones que las trenzas les habían impreso, le caían en manojos desordenados sobre el pañolón y parte

de la falda blanca, que recogía con la mano izquierda, mientras con la derecha se abanicaba con una rama de

albahaca” (retaining the waves that the braids had imprinted on them, fell in messy bunches over her shawl

and part of her white skirt, which she picked up with her left hand, while she held a branch of basil as a fan in

her right, 193). The seductive image of the goddess lifting her skirt and fanning herself with basil leaves, the

49
long, messy hair touching her body, shows an image of María that, though embodying a clearly neoclassical

beauty, evokes the most sensual side of the woman. María’s shawl, which could here imitate the draping of

linen textiles in Classical Antiquity, despite covering her body, also makes an allusion to the slipping of the

robes seen in neoclassical sculptures, where nakedness continues to be evident despite the draping of the

clothes over the body. It is interesting that the untied hair is what comes to cover the suggestion of the naked

body; the undulations of María’s hair could become the undulating movements of the caresses of the lover,

and her long hair covering, touching, her whole body, provides a sensual image of the nudity we never see.

Hair also appears undone in Díaz Casto’s novel, although it acquires less importance in the building

of female seductiveness. It is worth highlighting, however, that he does mention the curly hair of several

female characters of his novel, women that his narrator, don Demóstenes, often calls “hermosa negra”

(beautiful black woman) in several occasions. The curly nature of black hair, especially when left untouched,

immediately connotes a sense of savageness and an innate connection with slavery and subjugation, which

can also be of potential power, just like savage nature itself.

The savage nature of a woman—so stunning that both Isaacs

and Díaz Castro often compare it with the natural landscapes

of Colombia that they so much adore—while beautiful and

enchanting, is also tremendously dangerous for men. Because

men were thought to have no restraint, it became a woman’s

responsibility to control their natural instincts, to protect

both her own honor and the virtue of the man, as Vergara y

Vergara and his moralist friends are keen to attest. Thus,

controlling the sinful nature of femininity required the

woman to wear her hair in braids, hiding her natural

savageness, as Carmelo Fernández illustrates in his drawing

Vélez, Arriero i tejedor de Vélez (Fig. 8). But, despite having her Figure 8. Carmelo Fernández. Vélez, Arriero i tejedor de
Vélez, 1850. Watercolor on paper, 20 x 28 cm.
Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia

50
hair immaculately braided, the woman in the drawing is also misusing her shawl, leaving her bare shoulders

visible, showing the sometimes-contradictory uses of dress in the display of ideal female behavior. Moreover,

the fact that Díaz Castro stresses in his novel the beauty of the woman with her curly hair also means that,

sometimes, that savage beauty need not be controlled. He seems to suggest, implicitly at least, that women

should leave their hair as it is and stop controlling their natural femininity, however close to Eve it may be.

This provides, yet again, an important opportunity to push the boundaries of virginal femininity, to step away

from the domestic and pure side of womanhood, and to start constructing a new type of their own, far from

the impositions of the patriarchy. This pushing of boundaries, in many ways, could be done through a playful

engagement with both dress and the rules of appropriate behavior, and the comparison of the woman to

angels provides a perfect space for such an opportunity.

The Angelical Game of Mischief

Although the description of women as angels, as Luz Hincapié explains, was meant to encourage them to be

pure, innocent, and stay away from sin, an exemplary story from the Bible, the foundational text of the

Catholic religion that ruled the Colombian society for most part of the nineteenth century, illustrates how

angels can fall into misbehavior and turn into sinners in just a flicker of the eyes. As angels, women could find

opportunities to be playful, to push the boundaries of norms of dress and behavior, and to transgress

traditional gender division that subjugated her to domestic life. María, for example, when playing mischievous

games, “…se acusaba con su sonrisa. Sus ojos brillantes tenían la apacible alegría que nuestro amor les había

quitado; sus mejillas, el vivo sonrosado que las hermoseaba durante nuestros retozos infantiles” (…accused

herself with her smile. Her brilliant eyes had the mild happiness that our love had taken away from them; her

cheeks, the lively blush that beautified them during our infantile romps, 228). The same eyes that would beg

for the attention of her lover, that would show her suffering when being separated from him and facing her

inevitable death, were also the eyes that would seduce her platonic lover, the eyes that revealed María’s most

angelical self.

51
 This angelical playfulness would give María the perfect excuse to engage, sometimes at least, in

inappropriate feminine behavior, such as letting her shawl slide off from her shoulders. This was inevitably

noticed by Efraín, despite her attempt to hide it: “sin volverse hacia mí, cayó de rodillas para ocultarme sus

pies, desatóse del talle el pañolón, y cubriéndose con él los hombros, fingían jugar con las flores” (without

turning to look at me, she fell to her knees to hide her feet away from me, untied the shawl from her waist

and, covering with it her shoulders, pretended to play with the flowers, 16). She might have tried to compose

herself immediately as she noticed she was being seen by the male observer, but she also had the excuse of

being playing with the flowers to justify her impropriety, to justify the slippage of the shawl and the partial

nudity of her body. The seemingly innocent play would become even more dangerous when she would stay

up late with Efraín in his mother’s sewing room or when they would spend inappropriate amounts of time

together and consciously tried to hide their misbehavior from the rest of the household by taking different

ways to enter the dining room separately.95

The playful opportunities for misbehavior are made even more explicit in Manuela and not just seen

in the shawl that fails to fully cover the heroine’s shoulders when the reader first meets her. Manuela,

somehow, is an expert in appropriating most of the domestic labors of a woman, turning them all upside-

down, even managing to provide a reason for why women should not engage in them: she does needlework

with her friend Pía, but only as an excuse to gossip and complain about men subjugating women; she cleans

and organizes her guest’s room, but only to throw away the precious scientific findings that don Demóstenes

had accumulated during his travels around the country; and she carefully attains to the most important

religious celebrations, like the birth of St John the Baptist, but only to be able to dance until the sunrise and

party with her friends, male and female alike. A similar idea can be identified in Carmelo Fernández’s drawing

Tundama, Habitantes notables, where one upper-class woman lifts her skirt to reveal not only her boot but also

the petticoat underneath. The gesture could be read by the skeptic as an aesthetic element used by the artist to

elevate her status, to show explicitly her belonging to the class of the shod. But in his inscription of the

95Isaacs, 126. For example, when Efraín clearly states “Nos separamos para llegar al corridor por diferentes entradas” (We walked away from each
other to arrive to the corridor using different entrances).

52
drawing the artist is already positioning her, very clearly, in

the upper strata of society. The lifting of her skirt, therefore,

could be read by the avid woman wishing to push boundaries

of dress, as something more than just showing the subject’s

status. She will immediately notice the showing of the

underskirt; her sensual lifting of the skirt, if only by

centimeters, and the fallen shawl, though not revealing the

skin under the bodice of her dress, both suggest a use of dress

that falls, quite evidently, outside the rules imposed by

moralists of the time. This induces the male spectator to

submit to the woman’s sensuality and shows the female

spectator a way in which she, as well, can take hold of her

Figure 9. Carmelo Fernández. Tundama, Habitantes
own body, use her agency, and subvert the strict norms of notables, 1851. Watercolor on paper, 21 x 31 cm.
Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia
dress that were imposed upon her.

But it is Manuela who commits the most important transgression of virginal femininity: she is so

adventurous that she even dares to cross-dress, a capital sin in any nineteenth-century society. Although

Manuela’s cross-dressing is narrated rather anecdotally and excused behind her need to escape from the

villain don Tadeo, who prosecutes her until the end of the novel and even causes her death, the important

fact is that she does cross-dress and that she receives help directly from don Demóstenes—who could

actually be equated with Díaz Castro himself. When the heroine desperately tries to run away from the evil

hands of don Tadeo, the chivalric don Demóstenes himself suggests: “Vístete de hombre: es la manera más

segura… Aquí tienes los calzones—le dijo don Demóstenes, acercándose a su ropero—; ahí está esa camisa,

esa chaqueta y las botas” (Dress as a man: it is the most secure way… Here go the breeches—said don

Demóstenes while approaching his wardrobe—; there is the shirt, that jacket, and the boots, 175). Without

hesitating, Manuela accepts everything but the boots, saying they are too big for her, but more likely because

she is not willing to be tamed by the tropes of the civilizing, shod elite. Not only is it notable that the proper

53
don Demóstenes, or Díaz Castro himself, is the one encouraging Manuela to cross-dress, but also that

nothing is commented by the author through the voices of other characters in the novel. Díaz Castro, always

keen to denounce the ills of contemporary Colombian society, leaves Manuela’s cross-dressing untouched, a

message that could be read by the astute woman as an encouragement to rebel against the patriarchy, to

subvert to the virginal idea of femininity, and to take control of her own world. Moreover, Díaz Castro seems

to suggest, in this example at least, that the only way in which women will be able to end their subjugation

and reconstruct the gender roles of the patriarchy, is by putting on the trousers, quite literally, and take hold

of their bodies, their dresses, and their situations.

The use of humor throughout Díaz Castro’s novel and the satirical commentary that always seems to

surround his writing give him the opportunity to introduce underlying suggestions where the female readers

could spot a chance for the subversion of the virginal womanhood they were told to embody, and instead

imitate the actions of rebellious, though always sweet and funny, characters like Manuela. As Díaz Castro

seems to propose, if all women followed her example and engaged in a new construction of femininity, built

almost in opposition to the dictates of the patriarchal rulers, they would be able to reconstruct the nation in

which they live, become empowered, and engage in the public construction of nationhood. In this way, they

would be able to actively dress their own type of Colombianness in a way that allowed for more liberties

within the notion of femininity.

Fallen Angels, Living in Hell

And Manuela does find her own world, after cross-dressing to escape and arriving, with her fiancé, to the

town of Ambalema, a place where women were happy and free, living uninhibited of the subjugations

imposed by the patriarchy and all their rules of modesty, purity and simplicity. Upon her arrival to Ambalema

and seeing her old friend who had abandoned their hometown in favor of this almost paradisiac land,

Manuela se fijó en el traje de Matea, la cual tenía enaguas de crespón blanco con fondo del mismo color, camisa
bordada de seda negra, y un pañuelo de punto sobre los hombros. Sus dedos, garganta y orejas brillaban con
los adornos de oro fino, y aun su cabeza, porque las peinetas estaban chapeadas del mismo metal. Tenía
zapatos enchancletados, pero no tenía medias, y en la mano cargaba un rico pañuelo de batista.”

54
 (Manuela looked at Matea’s outfit, which had a petticoat of white crepe with lining of the same color,
embroidered shirt of black silk, and a knitted scarf over her shoulders. Her fingers, neck, and ears shone with
the adornments of fine gold, and even her head, because the combs were plated in the same metal. She had
sandal-like shoes but no socks, and held an expensive cambric kerchief in her hand. 260)

Matea’s dress, which reflects the style worn by most women in the town of Ambalema, is white and is

complemented by a shawl over her shoulders, but the gleaming golden decorations in her body reveal a

wealth in her dress that would have caused the outrage of Vergara y Vergara and other moralists of the time.

Not only the fine jewelry, but also the expensive decorations of her dress, from the silk shirt to the cambric

handkerchief, reveal the wealth that she, as a single woman working on her own, was able to amass in

Ambalema, a place where women could work and provide for themselves without the assistance of men.

It is unclear whether Díaz Castro considers this type of society better than the Colombian patriarchy,

for he describes it as hell—although mostly in terms of the high temperatures of the town, one of the most

important ports by the Magdalena River at the time. Moreover, Manuela is not left to enjoy a happy ending,

free from the subjugations of male villains such as don Tadeo, for the rest of her life. Instead, he manages to

find her in Ambalema, thus giving her an excuse to happily return to her parish. But what is clear is that Díaz

Castro provides women with the view of an alternative world, one where they could work and provide for

themselves, without having to subject to the tyrannies of men like don Tadeo, where they could wear fashion

and jewels as they like, and where they could avoid cooking and doing house work and instead party, drink

aguardiente, and smoke cigarettes with their friends. If Ambalema was hell, it was at least a type of hell where

fallen angels could live happily, where the high temperatures provide an almost perfect excuse to let go of the

useless shawls and other clothes meant to cover their skin. The astute female reader of Manuela would

instantly notice the importance of such a place, which, regardless of the accuracy of Díaz Castro’s

descriptions, did exist and was widely known by its name in nineteenth-century Colombia.

Manuela might have not been able to live forever in Ambalema but that does not mean that the

clever woman that read the novel had to live her same fate. She clearly had something to learn from the

heroine’s tragic destiny: upon her arrival back to her parish, Manuela decides to follow the Catholic mandate

and marry her fiancé in the Church of the town. But Manuela does not seem fully convinced of her decision.

55
Don Demóstenes thus provides encouraging words to Manuela, telling her to trust her natural savageness and

become the type of heroine that Díaz Castro himself might have wanted to see in real Colombian women:

¡Oh Manuela! No desconfíes de tus principios. Acuérdate del juramento que te hice al defender tu causa. Una
feliz casualidad me hizo conocerte. Al principio me sedujeron tus encantos: llegué a pensar que dominaría tu
débil voluntad porque te vi tolerante y cariñosa; pero al desengaño de mi orgullo ha seguido mi más alta
estimación hacia ti. Hoy te estimo como a una señora y vivo eternamente agradecido de tus beneficios y de tus
consejos y avisos…

(Oh, Manuela! Do not mistrust your principles. Remember the oath I made when defending your cause. A
happy coincidence made me meet you. At first I was seduced by your charms: I even thought I would dominate
your weak will because I saw you tolerant and loving; but to the disillusion of my heart has followed my highest
praise of you. Today, I value you like a woman and I live eternally grateful for your blessings and for your
advices and warnings… 172)

Even after cross-dressing and without getting married, Manuela becomes a real woman, not only to the eyes

of the narrator, but also to the eyes of the reading audience. Her womanhood lies in that, beyond her

seductiveness, weakness, and lovingness, she knows what she wants and she fights for it. This is the message

that Díaz Castro shares with the women that read his novel: he is warning them against marriage, against the

inevitable loss of the innocence—and thus the loss of a space for the subversion of rigid, virginal

femininity—that comes with it, against their eternal subjection to the husband and the male, patriarchal ruler.

This warning becomes real in Manuela when, on the day of her wedding, which was meant to be the happiest

day in a woman’s life in accordance with most moralists of the time, a shadow casts on her face, with the

visions of don Tadeo, the patriarchal villain, ruining her potential happiness and even threatening her life.

Perhaps unsurprisingly at this point, Manuela, like María, dies. However, unlike María, I believe

Manuela dies much more heroically: she dies to show her fellow citizenesses that they should construct an

Ambalema for themselves. She suggests that Colombia should become a place where women are also citizens,

where they enjoy their own rights, where they can take care of themselves without having to get married in

order to be happy. This subversion of the rules, which Díaz Castro introduces from the beginning of the

novel and continues to play with until Manuela’s death in the last one of his pages, provides an important

opportunity for female empowerment and the modification of strict gender roles in nineteenth-century

Colombian society. With the different political ideologies inundating the country’s thought, and despite the

great influence of the immense quantities of manuals of manners, priests, and family members that told

56
women what to do, there was still a chance for appropriation of the rules, for purposeful misunderstanding,

and for standing against the dominance of the patriarchy. Manuela turns out to be the exemplary woman to

achieve this. Just as Jesus Christ died to save his people, Díaz Castro made Manuela die as a wake-up call for

Colombian women to take on arms—even if these were only their arms of seduction—and use their dress to

fight for their liberty.

57
 IV

DRESSING THE COLOMBIAN WOMAN:

SUBVERTING VIRGINAL PURITY

In this thesis, I have studied the notion of an ideal type of Colombian woman in two of the canonical novels

and a group of watercolors of the nineteenth century: Jorge Isaacs’ María and Eugenio Díaz Castro’s Manuela,

and the watercolors created by Carmelo Fernández, Henry Price, and Manuel María Paz for the Comisión

Corográfica. The Colombian society of the nineteenth century, built through the negotiation of Spanish

colonial ideals with new republican ways of thought—mostly inspired in the ideas that emerged from the

French Revolution—was heavily gendered: while men were exhorted to engage in public debates, women

were expected to stay within the domestic sphere; their only role in the politics of nation building was in the

procreation and education of (male) citizens of virtue that would ensure the future of the recently freed

republic. Because the Colombian population by the second half of the nineteenth century was so mixed, clear

divisions of status based on race were difficult to establish. Moreover, like in most Western societies of the

time, establishing clear visual identifiers of class through the distinction between clothed/civilized and

naked/savage was no longer possible.

Dress thus became a central tool in the construction of femininity and, in particular, in the

characterization of the ideal type of Colombian woman encouraged by most artists and writers of the time: a

type of woman that was pious, submissive, pure and virginal. This ideal is portrayed almost perfectly in Jorge

Isaacs’ character of María. “Niña cariñosa y risueña, mujer tan pura y seductora” (loving and laughing girl,

pure and seductive woman, 30), however, María manages to embody both the chastity of Virgin Mary and the

sensuality of Eve, the sinner. She fully represents the ideal purity of the Catholic Colombian woman, while

always reminding the society of the danger so inherent in the uncontrolled nature of women. But because she

58
could neither reach the unattainable chastity of the Virgin nor become the femme fatale, seemingly the only

two possibilities for a nineteenth-century woman in a traditionally Catholic society, María must die.

But she does not before providing an example for an ever-growing female readership that was meant

to mold their own personalities and construct their womanhood around her: if María dies virgin from a love

story so impossible that it never consummates, she also dies because she does not achieve the status of a

goddess, always dressed with white linen, that Vergara y Vergara and his contemporaries would have adored

to see. However, even if her white dresses seem to represent the purity of the Catholic Virgin, the carnations

that surround her, the playfulness of her hair always caressing her curvaceous body, the shawls that slip from

her shoulders, and the feet that peek out from under her skirt, all make this angel of the home become a

dangerous woman. María’s failure to submit to the strict norms of dress that were expected of the nineteenth-

century Colombian woman caused her to become a potential fallen angel, to almost fall into sin. She dies of

love, and she dies virgin, before being able to commit any type of act that would have stained the white linen

of her dress, thus becoming the epitome of femininity, the ideal of womanhood that was promoted by

Colombian intellectuals of the nineteenth century. However, as I have intended to show in this thesis, María’s

virginity, her white purity, also left a space for women to create alternative forms of femininity. María’s ability

to play, her seductive hair when left unbraided, and the slipping shawl that provided her lover with exciting

sights of her skin all provided an opportunity for seemingly innocent misbehavior that could open the

potential for failure in the repetition of norms upon which femininity was constructed.

The watercolors of the Comisión Corográfica included in my analysis also reveal a potential for

subversion of the ideal of femininity that present in nineteenth-century Colombia. These drawings were

particularly important not only because they provided information on appropriate feminine behavior to

women who could not read, but also because they showed the ideals for different “types” of women, often

focusing on race. The watercolors frequently portrayed women of different classes and races wearing

different types of clothes, with women of the lower classes and with darker skin colors usually showing more

skin than those belonging to the white race and the upper classes. These differences in dress in the

59
characterization of different types of femininity provided Colombian women with the opportunity to

appropriate elements of the different races and classes they identified with. By varying the types of clothes

worn and defying the norms of acceptability in choosing to reveal more or less skin, according to ideas of

race and class, women had the opportunity to subvert the normative type of femininity and create a different

one of their own, based on values that could be distinct from the submissive domesticity imposed by the

gender politics of the time.

The potential for failure evidenced in María’s playfulness is most fully exploited by Eugenio Díaz

Castro in his character of Manuela. The image of Manuela is one of female empowerment and the liberty of

the woman as embodied through dress. Through the unruly hair that is not tied by the braids, the lifted skirt

that shows off the skin, the white fabric, not of the outer dress, but of the underskirt, she gave women an

alternative example of femininity. These elements were also present in a variety of visual sources available for

the nineteenth-century Colombian women to see. The duty of viewers was not limited to absorbing and

imitating the rules of womanhood imposed by the manuals of manners and the power of the patriarchy

expressed in the words of Vergara y Vergara and other moralists of the time. Rather, they were meant to

understand these rules and spot places for potential slippage in order to appropriate the norms as their own

and engage, through their agency, in the reconstruction of a feminine version of Colombianness.

In identifying the ways in which dress—and with it the traditional ideal of domesticized, submissive,

and virginal femininity—could be subverted, following the examples of Manuela, and even those of María in

the moments she dared to pushed the boundaries herself, Colombian women was able to subvert the

traditional constructions of gender in the creation of the national identity. They were able to re-create the

notions of femininity and empower the different women of the country. For, as Judith Butler so avidly

explains, in the creation of gender, “repetition is at once a reenactment and re-experiencing of a set of

meanings already socially established … gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an

60
exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.”96 Gender, therefore, has a performative power that makes of

femininity an ideal to be subverted: there is always a chance of failure in the lack of repetition, a possibility for

change, for a completely new performance, from which new gender norms and new identities can emerge.97

By identifying the spaces for appropriation of the norms imposed by the unequal power relations imposed by

the patriarchal society in the form of letters, manuals of manners, articles in periodicals, and even novels and

pictures themselves, women could find a chance to break the cycle of repetition. In doing so, there could be

an opportunity for nineteenth-century Colombian women to subvert strict gender norms and construct a new

type of femininity of their own, to make of the newborn Colombian society a kind of “Ambalema” for

themselves.

96 Judith Butler, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions,” in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 10th Anniversary Edition (London
and New York: Routledge, 2006), 40.
97 Ibid., 141.

61
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